I watched that entire video. This is a bad review — except perhaps from the perspective of science deniers, or those ignorant to the science.
Too many subjective descriptions like “refinement” and “detail extraction” etc., and it’s clear he buys into snake-oil with his expensive audio quest cables and amps. Most of the difference he describes between these can be easily explained by frequency response differences.
I appreciate that he at least tries not to use descriptors like “musical”, and is helping introduce / popularize active speakers into the snake-oil audiophile world, at least.
But this is by no means a good or well-informed (unless he’s hiding it) comparison of active vs passive. For example, he WAY overspends on amps that probably massively underperform cheaper Hypex amps as reviewed on this site, and completely omits any discussion on DSP or room correction.
For reference, this is the
same guy who promoted using a $15k DAC to feed the analog inputs to the Genelec 8341 while willingly choosing NOT to use the digital inputs! This is laughably absurd, given that this is a digital active speaker that must convert any analog inputs into digital first before it does anything at all with them. And he does this in the same review where he *acknowledges* that it has digital inputs, and that he *consciously* opts for the $15k DAC into analog inputs anyway — which is not only wasteful of money, but objectively can only ever
reduce sound quality by losing information from extra conversion steps.
He is therefore either utterly incompetent at understanding audio signal chains, OR compromised by marketing pressure to push expensive snake oil producers like his audioquest cables and $15k DACs and similarly overpriced amps. In either case, you as a consumer will be far better off if you steer clear from his reviews.
