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Active Designs & Their Favorability

Tim Link

Addicted to Fun and Learning
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Apr 10, 2020
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When I experimented with digital active crossovers back in the early 2000s I became convinced that they were inherently superior. I think this was because I had never owned speakers with well optimized passive crossovers. Over the years I've acquired various speakers and bypassed their passive crossovers using my active digital gear. After doing this enough I heard some speakers that were easy to improve and others that were difficult to get sounding even as good as they did with their own passive networks. So my experience is also that a passive network that's well optimized is pretty much as good as an active, and since it only needs a single amplifier it can be perhaps a better value for the end consumer. Other things I've heard people say is that an active network makes improvements at the pre-amp and amplifier level as well by reducing the complexity of the signal, so a set of cheaper amps might sound as good as an expensive amp trying to run all the drivers at once. Besides dividing power requirements between amps I think this assumes that electronic components are susceptible to multi-tone distortion. It seems from what I've seen of the testing here that IM from multitone signals at the amp and preamp level not likely to be an audible issue. For the home speaker builder like myself who likes to tweak and experiment a lot, the active digital crossover is a lot of fun.
 

Lorenzo74

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Nov 17, 2019
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