Passive or powered monitor?

[NiagaraPete]

Neumann and Genelec are known for great support and reliability

Decades of support with these brands.

 

[HarmonicTHD]

Decades of support with these brands.

I own Neumann.

 

[ZolaIII]

Good speakers are good speakers. Your choice may depend upon what is more suitable for your needs and budget of course. I am for flexibility myself and not only regarding speakers/amplifier alone but also the digital processing chain and this is part that progresses the most quickly but ironically good and polished software is hard to find. You will find capable enough SoC's in line with current processing requirements up to 64 bit's FP in your phone, NAS, rooter even TWS but you won't find them in most of active speakers sold today and when it comes to software count will hardly get over one hand fingers all together counting in embedded and standalone. From what ever mentioned only small part of those SoC's will be useful to you or any end user like Pi development board's for example.

 

[Matthias McCready]

A point on "processing" audio on the computer or chip side, it often seems to be pretty minimal.

Sure if you are on the studio side and your computer us running DAW with hundreds of plugins over 64+ tracks in real-time that is some CPU load, but for most hardware especially if it only FIR taps or an EQ, or a simple delay doesn't require insane processing.

Our use cases are asking for what? Processing a few channels? Even if you had a complex surround system where drivers are processed individually at most this would probably be less than 30 channels.

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For example I was poking around inside a DiGiCo console (one the most powerful digital live audio consoles) the other day, and under the hood it was running lowly Windows XP and it boasted 2x 5Gb hard drives! That is a show stable desk that can process around 128 channels of audio (EQ, Ms delay, 2x dynamics, sidechaining) that is not including the bus, matrix, and other processing architecture. In fact the software that the consoles runs is less than 12 Megabytes in size!

Keep in mind that a live desk needs to have lower latency and higher stability than a home product does (it might very well be used to drive a vocalists IEM's in front of crowd of thousands).

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Computing is cheap and readily available these days, and for most use cases it already probably far surpasses our minimal processing needs.

 

[dfuller]

Good brands for support include:

- ATC (will repair and upgrade decades-old speakers, no problem -they do almost all of their manufacturing in-house so it's totally possible to support things long-term).
- Genelec (will repair decades-old speakers, no problem - large stock of spare parts because they are first and foremost a pro-marketed company).
- Focal (again, primarily in-house manufacturing, so long term support is viable)

Generally OK:
- Neumann (semi-limited, generally does not offer anything smaller than whole assemblies and less inclined to ship parts to you)
- Adam (supported 15 year old S3As for me when needed, but not sure for cheaper stuff)
- Barefoot (still repairing 15+ year old MM27s, but those speakers sound bad so like...)


Re: DSP in speakers, it's useful but not essential for good performance.

 

[Frgirard]

I'm curious about the quality of the amps in powered speakers. Or, can I do better with an amp and passive speakers. I'll be listening about 6-8 ft (2M) from the speaker.

The quality what is it ?

The advantage to powered speaker is the amp is adapted to the speaker.

 

[ZolaIII]

A point on "processing" audio on the computer or chip side, it often seems to be pretty minimal.

Sure if you are on the studio side and your computer us running DAW with hundreds of plugins over 64+ tracks in real-time that is some CPU load, but for most hardware especially if it only FIR taps or an EQ, or a simple delay doesn't require insane processing.

Our use cases are asking for what? Processing a few channels? Even if you had a complex surround system where drivers are processed individually at most this would probably be less than 30 channels.

----

For example I was poking around inside a DiGiCo console (one the most powerful digital live audio consoles) the other day, and under the hood it was running lowly Windows XP and it boasted 2x 5Gb hard drives! That is a show stable desk that can process around 128 channels of audio (EQ, Ms delay, 2x dynamics, sidechaining) that is not including the bus, matrix, and other processing architecture. In fact the software that the consoles runs is less than 12 Megabytes in size!

Keep in mind that a live desk needs to have lower latency and higher stability than a home product does (it might very well be used to drive a vocalists IEM's in front of crowd of thousands).

----

Computing is cheap and readily available these days, and for most use cases it already probably far surpasses our minimal processing needs.

Software is 20 years in the past compared to hardware and with limited development efforts you do want to follow mainline as closely as possible and as open as possible to retain quality and flexibility. It's not about processing power nor specialised hardware accessories (DSP's in this case) but quite opposite. Now you mentioned it a live PCM to DSD 128 convertion neads in current state of written transcoding software (bad optimised and not using SIMD with SMP affinity up to 4) require quad core ARM A72~A73 @ 2 GHz which disqualifies even most potent Brodcom SoC used in Pi's up to date for the task and that's not something we can't imagine as something someone will want to do (for what ever reason he may have). Used just for example of course.

 

[Holmz]

Truth is you can get good and bad actives, as well as passives. I'd let practicalities guide you. If you are starting from no gear and have the budget, honestly I'd go active. All-in-one confers benefits as mentioned above, and often takes care of a lot of the complicated stuff for you (EQ, and some do DSP, room correction, etc). Aesthetically they're more pleasing, as you don't have boxes and cables running all over the place.

If you already have some good gear (amp, dac, dsp, etc), then I'd go passive. You can always sell your old speakers, or your old amp, and gradually change gear in and out. It's a lot harder to sell it all off at once to buy actives.

That said, the downside of actives is that it's almost impossible to make incremental upgrades. You really have to burn all your budget at once to get a good pair of say, Genelecs. It's a lot harder to buy and sell 2nd hand, than it is with passives (buy an amp 2nd hand and you can sell it for more or less what you paid for).

This whole post is good, and mirrors my thoughts.

However the last paragraph - assumes that one needs to upgrade.
Wanting to upgrade is one thing, but these active systems do not need cables and the amps are good.
It is an engineered system.
So the upgrade path is a better active, and one should probably get better ones, that ticks all the boxes.

Just as an example one could be starting with a Sonos and then upgrading to a Buchart, or Genelec… just avoiding the Sonos first saves one upgrade step.
Although the Sonos is an upgrade from a Bose.

 

[Matthias McCready]

This whole post is good, and mirrors my thoughts.

However the last paragraph - assumes that one needs to upgrade.
Wanting to upgrade is one thing, but these active systems do not need cables and the amps are good.
It is an engineered system.
So the upgrade path is a better active, and one should probably get better ones, that ticks all the boxes.

Just as an example one could be starting with a Sonos and then upgrading to a Buchart, or Genelec… just avoiding the Sonos first saves one upgrade step.
Although the Sonos is an upgrade from a Bose.

I would agree with your point of view:

My mixing rig is a pair of active monitors with digital inputs, they also have extension down to 20hz.

As long as it is functional, it works as the designer has intended it to. If it were to not operate up to spec, I would ship it in to the manufacturer to bring it back to spec.

For me it is an "end-game" rig; no need for incremental upgrades.