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The broader point of this thread should not be lost in the discussion of amps. And to me (at least), the biggest paradigm shift I've had re: JBL (and Klipsch) is that horn/waveguide speakers are no longer "boom and screech" designs. You can get very nice sounding speakers with controlled directivity that sound every bit as good as the "audiophile" speakers using Danish drivers in a box. That's a massive shift, IMO. I mean, in the past, it was always possible to modify one of these speakers to sound good for our purposes and there's a pretty large cottage industry that's sprung up around that. But nowadays it's possible to get a JBL or Klipsch speaker that sounds good out-of-the-box. That's pretty amazing, I think.
No arguments from me, but I would choose the passive model(s).
It's too bad that some don't invest the money into going to a manufacturer like this. Then it would make sense on many levels including why these speakers and the M2 sound like they do. Oh, and one of the design goals of the M2 was to make the waveguide sound like a dome. That was direct from the horses mouth too. There is just so much one will never know without due diligence and of course living with them. Making a waveguide isn't just beveling some MDF either...it's actual real design work to accomplish that and that includes not only the knowledge of acoustics but also some very powerful software, hardware, anechoic and a spinorama. Polar plots tell the real story...not just some heavily smoothed bastardized frequency curves like most show. There is a real difference contrary what most believe.
I personally hate all crossovers. Give me an active full range speaker that has no crossovers, and I will be one of the first to buy one.
If sound quality matters, good active speakers trump good passive speakers, period. Added integration/complexity of any product is bound to reduce reliability......
Still own very nice single driver speakers, my commissioned Brines FTA-2000 (90 dB/w/m, 30-20,000 Hz, 8 ohms, 109 dB/m peak, use AlNiCo drivers, they were my "babies" for 14 years) but the 708Ps beat them in nearly every way. Would you like to buy them?
Has anyone here compared the best full range passives vs. the best of actives? There is a quality in both formats......
I have a friend who writes articles for AudioXpress magazine working on this very project. He built a pair of 3 way speakers and (external) passive crossovers with very high quality drivers and parts, and has just completed integrating a 3 way DEQX active crossover with DSP and time alignment, tri-amped. The active set up was assisted by the tech at DEQX over the interweb. I just heard them head to head for the first time last week.
Of course, his results will be invalid because the speakers designed for the test are fundamentally flawed because they weren't built with a billion-dollar R&D budget, polar plots, anecholic chambers, spinoramas... I'm not saying none of those things can't help in designing and building just about anything, and I'm not blind to the march of the technology industry in that progress is now almost completely evolutionary rather than revolutionary and voraciously guarded as the exclusive province of massive industrial-corporate think tanks grinding away for profit with the occasional nugget of technological advancement popping out almost by mistake as an afterthought, but without inspired folks, "just beveling mdf," so to speak, almost none of the technology we enjoy (or seem to enjoy evangelizing/demonizing) would even exist. Apple was founded in a garage, Facebook in a college dorm room, and Klipsch in a tin shed. Obviously failures will outnumber successes and no matter how technology/progress appears, its creation is more like lightning striking than the reliable and inevitable march of any preconceived methodical process (no matter how much the people literally spending the billions of dollars trying to do so would really like it to be otherwise for very obvious and similarly obviously beneficial to all of us reasons), disregarding the work and effort of a one-person operation (or being fair the fruits of industrialized science for that matter) whole cloth for whatever reason is metaphorically throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For those of us sitting in our homes enjoying consumer technology products, we're all more or less panning for gold (sorry the metaphors are getting a little thick) in a search for whatever makes us happy, some places to look are more likely fruitful than others, but as long as we're pointed generally in the right direction, there's going to be gold in them there hills for whoever is patient and persistent enough to go after it.
JLM, for studio monitors, I agree but prefer the integration of the M2 model with amps/crossovers in a separate box, just not building the technology into the cabinets themselves.
My buddy Rex agrees with you.
I have a friend who writes articles for AudioXpress magazine working on this very project. He built a pair of 3 way speakers and (external) passive crossovers with very high quality drivers and parts, and has just completed integrating a 3 way DEQX active crossover with DSP and time alignment, tri-amped. The active set up was assisted by the tech at DEQX over the interweb. I just heard them head to head for the first time last week. As you say, there are qualities to like in both implementations. If I was looking for close to the source monitoring, I'd no doubt choose the active. If I was putting them into my living room to listen to music for relaxation, I might choose the passive. At least one other person attending clearly preferred the passive. It's the first time I've heard this passive/active comparison with the same speakers. His article will probably run sometime later this year about the project.
Was this Tom's Egg speakers?
