What is the best passive bookshelf to convert to active - under US$800 a pair

[theyellowspecial]

JBL 530 another good candidate with bi-wire terminals. Someone in the 530 thread posted their active crossover results and they looked impressive.

 

[jhaider]

Used KEF Q900. Big ugly thing, but outstanding drivers and the passive crossover is too minimal to optimize them. Replace the terminal plate with NL8 Speakon. I have used the Q900 coax in a desktop speaker and loved it until the size got to me and I replaced with KH80 DSP.

I don’t know about Q950. It may be as good or better. I am however perhaps irrationally ill-disposed to speakers that downgrade from cast alloy to stamped frame drivers in new versions, as KEF did from Qx00 to Qx50 lines. Also Q900 could fit your budget if you can find but Q950 probably not.

 

[dfuller]

I'm inclined to say (after Amir's review) that the Dynaudio M10s might fit the bill. Top of that budget, but the only real downside is the less-than-amazing crossover design. Be mildly tricky to fit a plate amp in it anywhere, but not impossible, and drivers are good.

 

[jhaider]

Maybe NHT C3. Would be curious to see if you could make a "perfect speaker" through equalization, or if you just messed up the tonality. It would be hard with a 2 way but easier with a 3-way I think.

NHT did a great job with the passive here. Rather than throw it away (and risk driver damage) I’d try one broad midrange filter to see if you can remove the slight forward bias without killing the great aspects of this speaker (assuming you don’t get one with a broken midrange!).

 

[Thunder22]

Maybe a bit off topic but I would like to hear people's thoughts. Paradigm is offering their PW series at 50% off. The pw-600 comes with...

Anthem® Class-D Amp; 400W Dynamic Peak; 200W RMS, and

Anthem Room Correction - ARC™, with included calibrated microphone.

My question is since these are so cheap could somebody buy a couple, rip the amps, dsp, ect. out in order to use in a set of passive speakers to make them active?

 

[Chrispy]

I don't see the value in playing around with a consumer speaker like this, rather than a deliberately designed system....

 

[gene_stl]

Buy a nice set of Yamaha NS1000M NS1000X or NS 2000 and make them active. See dualazmak's thread on the subject.
Absolutely best speaker to do it with and when you are finished you will have something very worth keeping.

 

[MrPeabody]

I'm inclined to say (after Amir's review) that the Dynaudio M10s might fit the bill. Top of that budget, but the only real downside is the less-than-amazing crossover design. Be mildly tricky to fit a plate amp in it anywhere, but not impossible, and drivers are good.

I will second that. Two things that can't be fixed with signal processing are directivity and distortion. The M10 isn't the very best in terms of directivity index, but it is still fairly good, and in terms of distortion it is better than most of the other speakers that would likely be considered. And at $800 the pair, the cost is considerably lower than if, for example, one of the Kef bookshelf speakers were used.

 

[Thunder22]

I don't see the value in playing around with a consumer speaker like this, rather than a deliberately designed system....

The value would be the fun and using what I have laying around.

 

[Tangband]

JBL 530 another good candidate with bi-wire terminals. Someone in the 530 thread posted their active crossover results and they looked impressive.

Maybe it was me .
Yes, making the jbl 530 active with dsp filtering brings a big sonic improvement compared to passive. But you have to have measurement equipment so you really know what you are doing . You still dont get Genelec performance in the 3000 dollar range, but maybe a sound compared to 1000 dollar.

 

[Chrispy]

The value would be the fun and using what I have laying around.

So you do already have a speaker to play with? That I can see, but buying one? Just build one of your own....