Bob Reynolds has it right when he says "You hear it all the time on this forum to "trust your ears", yet audiophiles, in general, are locked into old traditions that preclude active designs. So they never get a chance to trust their ears."
Most absolutely do not trust their ears, and would rather trust their intuition about what baloney story they get sucked into. They would also rather trust the ears of reviewers. Hence, mediocre sounding and relatively high distortion speakers can sell just as well as great speakers, even in the stratospheric price ranges.
I hear several hours of live music 300+ days a year, and what passes for good sound in the modern high end industry astounds me. Excuses range from "we all have different ears" to "this is so accurate it shows flaws in recordings".
Sorry, serious distortion is serious distortion no matter how you cut it.
I use passive speakers. But I will say that I have found that a higher percentage of self-powered speakers sound better than conventional speakers. Maybe you have to know more to make a self-powered work without blowing up while anyone can throw drivers, capacitors, and coils in a box and call themselves a speaker designer. Well, they don't present themselves as just designers usually. They present themselves as knowing much more than anyone else, true experts who have done what nobody else has.
