I'm in agreement with MarinRider.
Active seems like a simple solution, but it apparently it is not. I have not heard that many active implementations, but none have sounded natural. They can sound powerful and effortless, but there was always something about the sound that was not quite right. The problem might have been the amplfication; it might have been the active crossover. Others, whose opinion I respect, also feel that active systems aren't there yet.
I beg to disagree, Jerry, in my book, active systems have been there since the mid-70ies. Or, specifically, since two active systems hit the market - Philips' Motional Feedback series and UK's Red (if anyone even remembers them nowadays).
I agree completely with the view that active systems, like any and all other audio gear, will produce radically different sound from one extreme to the other. This stands to reason - different drivers, different crossovers, different amps, etc. Obviously, such will also be the range of we hear, from what we downright hate to what we love, with anything in between.
I believe one of the key strengths of the Philips system was in the fact that there was a number of adjustments you could, and in fact were expected, advised and coached to do, to each individual driver, and the speaker as a whole. This allowed for unparallelled fitting in of the speaker to virtually any and all rooms, in itself a masterful idea and job. Furthermore, those were the days when Philips dedicated some really wise people to such projects (incidentally, one of them was Professor Matti Otala, the Finnish amp guru, who took part in designing the amps, after which he went on to work for Harman/Kardon for 12 years). Later on, they got Marantz as part of the CD rights deal with Sony and relegated all audio onto Marantz - a damn fool mistake if you ask me, but that was that.
Anyway, those speakers could - and generally did - blow the mind of anyone who heard them well set up. And herein lies a problem - you really had to set them up for best results, which as you can imagine most people simply didn't bother to do. Those that did, and I met a couple of them, enjoyed a quality of sound you'd be hard pressed to find even today, almost 30 years down the road.
Red from UK was much the same - set it up properly, and it could work magic. ATC today can also do the same, work some powerful voodoo and teleport you from the room to the stage or the audience.
But there were others who truly missed the point. The much revered Klein&Hummel from Germany did, does and probably will continue to sound aggressive, and calling it harsh is being polite, it's incisive - but with your eardrums. Oh, they are capable of prodigious numbers of decibells, the trouble is that those decibells are all skewed, skewered and sometimes barbecued. Awful! I would never buy them.
Contrast these with offerings from Switzerland's Studer and stand in awe. Much smaller, but so precise, to pinpointed, yet not aggressive, not harsh, honestly trying to be neutral. But then, Willi Studer has been making stuff for audio pros for 50 years.
Jerry, the trouble with most commercially available active systems is that they try too hard to meet a price point, and to that end, they cut far too many corners. Typical failings include weedy power supplies, hybrid output stages (power ICs, often by Sanyo or Technics/Panasonic), s**t drivers, etc, etc, etc.
They reason like this - who, or how many, will be willing to buy a system with high quality amps and power supplies with real muscles, driving high quality drivers, when all that will end up costing well into four figure numbers for even a small two way box? And this is not altogether wrong - how many companies can you name straight off specializing, or at least having produced, some memorable active systems? In other words, such manufacturers are NOT in the focal point of the general market, where production and sales numbers are, and hence where big profits lie.
Lastly, a subjective problem - audiophiles can't tweak them half as much as they can when playing the game of mix'n'match.
Ah, my sssssinusssesssss!
Cheers,
DVV
