Stick some tubes in there and see if that helps.
Active Speakers Don't Sound Better
I just wanted to settle a debate that has often raged in A’gon about active vs. passive speakers with my own first hand experience. I’ve recently had the chance to complete a 3-way active center channel to match my 2-way passive speakers.
I can absolutely say that the active nature of the speaker did not make it sound better. Or worse. It has merged perfectly with my side speakers.
What I can say is that it was much easier to achieve all of the technical design parameters I had in mind and that the speakers have better off-axis dispersion as a result, so it is measurably slightly better than if I had done this as a passive center. Can I hear it? I don’t think so. I think it sounds the same.
From an absolute point of view, I could have probably achieved similar results with a passive speaker, but at the cost of many more crossover stages and components. It was super easy to implement LR4 filters with the appropriate time delays, while if I had done this passively it would require not just the extra filter parts but all pass filters as well. A major growth in part counts and crossover complexity I would never have attempted. So it's not like the active crossover did any single thing I couldn't do passively, but putting it all together was so much easier using DSP that it made it worthwhile.
I can also state that as a builder it was such a positive experience that I may very well be done with making passive speakers from now on.
All the best,
Erik
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@o_holter You make exactly the right argument for an external, active crossover. If you want to roll your own amps you can't do this with a fully active speaker design. My listening trends lately have been a lot more about movies than music though, so as I transition to more active speakers I'm interested in minimizing devices and cables as much as I can. |
Seems to me the greatest motivation in buying active speakers is to save space. They're already making speakers smaller to have people more happy about buying them as evidence by smaller driver sizes which I think has been a negative. Now because the speaker designs have drivers that are too small you have to buy subwoofers because the bass can't be handled as well because currently produced narrower main speakers are to narrow. Of course they can produce active speakers that sound good but then there's always power issues and concerns that maybe can't be solved anymore which otherwise could be solved by buying a new amplifier for passive speaker. Isn't it really that simple
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Don’t forget convenience. With active speakers, you could literally have a single component (streaming DAC) with variable volume control (certainly not rare these days) and all you would need is an Ethernet cable to the network, a pair of ICs, and “Bob’s your uncle.” |
@o_holter wrote:
What’re the technicalities of your experience/experiment here? I mean, what do you do filter-wise with the active speakers once you’ve stripped them to a passive state - fit them with passive crossovers between the amp and drivers instead, or use the existing DSP and then combine it with your own external amp + 2 more amp channels if it’s a 2-way design? Let’s say it’s a 2-way speaker you’d want to keep actively configured, then you would need to add another of your preferred stereo amp (one for each driver section), somehow use the existing DSP and your once active speaker with built-in amps and DSP has now been retrofitted by-passing their internal amps and re-configured actively with amps of your choosing. Is that the way of it? @erik_squires wrote:
Wrong. A fully active speaker design can be done fitting it all into the speaker as well as having the amps and DSP external to it. Semantically you wouldn’t call the latter an active speaker per se because its amp and DSP components are external to it, but insofar the crossover function via the DSP is done prior to the amplification on signal level (and they’re no passive crossover parts between the amps and drivers) and the respective amp channel are connected directly to their driver sections, it’s a fully actively configured speaker design. Period, end of f*cking story. Fully actively one can use any external amp one sees fit, as long as you have enough of them to cover the respective driver sections. You would of course need an external DSP as well (again: prior to amplification on signal level, and sans passive XO parts for it to be called fully active), the real challenge being setting filter values - certainly if they’re done on your own. Or, a manufacturer could set the filter values just as they would, basically, a passive crossover - like ATC (electronic, analogue XO), Bryston, Sanders Sound, JBL etc. - and provide them as part of the design one way of the other. The ATC SCM300 Pro ASL’s, and others, have power amps and electronic XO/DSP external to the speakers, but that doesn’t make them any less actively configured. |
- 72 posts total