The best is to go out and listen for youself - the ls50wII vs ls50 is as good a comparison can get .
I guess you didn’t read that I did just that, and the bass is eq’ed differently and it shows up in measurements (as mentioned by multiple members). Also, a central premise of ASR is “go out and listen” is actually not the best. Double blind with exceptionally tight controls are needed. Please go and read if you haven’t.
There are real technical benefits below about 200 Hz with an active crossover and directcoupled drivers - no one disputes that.
Actually, we are trying to tell you that your claim is disputed as stated. It seems you have misunderstood the Purifi and other papers. And perhaps don’t realize that inductors used in woofer crossovers are straight wire below 200 Hz. For instance, the LS50 Meta crossovers in the white paper I posted here yesterday. L1 and L2 are just wires at low frequency.
Before you jump to the conclusion that these inductors are responsible for the bass eq differences between the active and passive LS50’s, please follow the Benchmark whitepaper and explicitly calculate the damping factor and frequency impact due to L1 and L2 (you can find ranges of inductor DCR to work with at you favorite parts supplier, please choose iron core inductors. If you want to know why, please read the KEF paper I posted!) You will find the bass response due to the inductors is an order of magnitude lower than the eq differences between the active and passive versions. And those differences are way below audibility. Even with speakers that have horrible impedance, these inductors are a non issue.
Allmost all music benefits and gonna sound better because of this fact. This is a clear advantage, and the anectdotical advantages of a high output impedance at higher frequencies with passive crossovers is not proven in every case.
The notch isn’t anecdotal it’s a real common use case, you can see the notch filter in the LS50 crossover above. Notches are real and incredibly useful since so many great drivers need resonances damped. You just ignore the Purifi paper, since it is inconvenient (not anecdotal). You don’t get to just ignore stuff unless you can actually explain.
See, lots of us (myself included) believe active is
in general superior. The problem is that there are many areas where no advantage exists either way, and even areas where passive is better. Ultimately active allows flexibility beyond passive, and the areas where active is disadvantaged are minor in most cases. But you seem bent on the idea that passives are just bad in any implementation, and are challenging these observations with anecdotes (I do think you need to look up that word!)
My biggest issue is a few of us have worked through some of the math for you, put some time into explaining the articles, but you either didn’t read or didn’t understand or just blew off the physics because it didn’t fit your predisposition. Instead you have quoted some stuff out of context and provided zero data, just anecdotes (gosh, you shouldn’t have misused that word, now I can’t avoid it!!!)
