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Are active speakers the best upgrade

I have recently heard Brentworth (single driver, no crossover) and ATC active 100's. They were both vey revealing speakers and it occurred to me that we're chasing better electronics while maybe the speaker crossover is putting all this distortion back into the system.
Is the fact that these speakers are active what makes them so clear? Has anyone compared the active vs. passsive versions of ATC?
It's interesting that ATC focuses on accuracy in the drivers by eliminating hysteresis effects and 1st and 3rd order harmonics while B&W focuses more on the enclosure. I wonder how good B&W could sound if they made their Nautilus speakers active. Maybe they use such good crossovers that its as good as ATC's external crossover. Any thoughts?
cdc
justdan
9 posts
 
There are many active biamped 2-ways on the market. They're marketed as "studio monitors".

And of course powered subwoofers are all the rage.

What we don't see are a lot of active full-range tower speakers.
dennisj
39 posts
 
For me, a big YES. I sold my Tylers and Egglestons and purchased one of the last fifty pairs of Paradigm V2.Active 40s. On Osiris stands, JPS, HT and Luminous ICs and a Rogue 99 Magnum with Sylvania GTAs the sound is glorious.

Bass is awesome, this is the most enjoyable system I have owned. According to Paradigm plans were for active 20s, through 100s, due to lagging sales and combined with a higher cost factor the 20s and 40s have been discontinued.

As to the 40s, 2k and you get 4 amps, what a sweet deal, yet audiophiles did not respond. I think one review said it best " Audiophiles don't buy 2k speakers and 2k was to pricy for the rest"
ezmeralda11
303 posts
 
As far as i can reason, active is more/very cost effective for what it offers. Has anyone ever priced metal cases for amps-$100 a piece starting on up? Making a speaker cabinet a little bigger to compensate for the amps volume is alot cheaper-MDF costs less then metal. Not to mention it cleans up alot of listening room clutter of equipment and gets the speaker cable runs down to a few feet (two feet of good 14g cable is probably as good as 12 or 14 feet of high-performance wire). It also eliminates the needs for zobels in many cases and allows the designer to design the amp with a specific driver in mind, increasing performance more.
And with the active crossover, all it needs is a volume nob to become a preamp. The performance gains are just too great to be ignored. And its shocking that you find pieces of crap $70,000 speaker using passive networks. People pay obscene amounts of money for crap. The best active crossover would smoke the best passive crossover for less money. Burmester has an $80,000 pr of speaker using a $300 raven r-2 ribbon tweet and two seas excel aluminum cones (<$200 each) per side plus the lf section and passive crossover, all for $80,000. Its obvious that the best products for the money don't always win in a free market economy, which I though was one of the underlying ideas/virtues behind such. Company images and ideologies sell better.
unsound
7,344 posts
 
I am no expert, but I can't help thinking that keeping the electronics away from the vibrations, magnetic fields and limted heat dissipation that come with most speakers might be a better idea. I do agree that putting the amps before the crossover seems like a superior method.
unsound
7,344 posts
 
I did it again, PUTTING THE COSSOVERS BEFORE THE AMPS SEEMS LIKE A SUPERIOR METHOD! Sorry!
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