ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Take a look at a retailer like Richer Sounds and you will find that they have only one active speaker set (for a computer desk top set-up) vs about 160 pairs of passive. Does the active speaker approach, with the need for a power supply to each speaker, really have any great advantages over the passive approach for the typical domestic room set-up?
Graham
In a general engineering sense, active (powered) speakers are almost always superior, and they are much easier and cheaper to make excellent than are passive speakers. The list of technical advantages is long, and I won't go into them here.
In an argumentative theoretical sense, it is possible for passive speakers to be made to equal or almost equal active ones, if the builder/or user possesses the technical knowledge, ability and test facilities to do the work. But it's actually quite hard, and very expensive.
At Sausalito Audio, we never consider passive designs any more, just active ones, for the engineering ease, excellent performance and reduced costs.
I hope this helps.
Best regards,
Dave Moulton, Sausalito, Audio
Thanks for that, Dave.
So, to turn the argument the other way around, the majority of passive speakers sold at big discounts by the likes of Richer Sounds might not be that well made or designed if they are being made/ sold at a low price.... yet they will often have good reviews in the press whilst at the same time B&O speakers are ignored or dismissed as overpriced or not for the serious listener. It's a strange world!
It is (relatively) quite easy to design a good power amplifier which will measure and perform very well indeed. It is very difficult to design a speaker to do the same. Just fitting a power amplifier into a speaker cabinet isn't really the whole story, it achieves very little on it's own - what it does allow however is for the individual amplifiers response to be tailored to the individual drivers, for example each amplifier EQ can be adjusted to compensate for any deficiencies in each driver response resulting in a combination which gives a much better overall performance than the driver on it's own or even the driver driven with an external technically perfect power amp. These EQ adjustments are done at signal level (or even in the digital domain) before the power stage and so are relatively easy to achieve.
Most studio nearfield monitors are active designs - from a domestic hifi angle, it removes the ability to "fiddle, pontificate and upgrade" and hence isn't that popular among the believers.
Ban boring signatures!
Having said all that, and I agree with it, it is not true that all active speakers are going to be better than passive ones!! It is merely easier to avoid making awful ones unless you really don't understand what you are doing! B&O have made some excellent passive speakers but instead of the active amplifiers being used to tailor the sound to mask the deficiency of the drive units, the crossover is used to attempt to do much the same. However it has to be done forn an amplified signal and also without knowing the characteristics of the amplifier. B&O used to produce speakers for systems which seemed to sound particularly good with the system they were designed for. The Beovox 1200 and Beomaster 1200 spring to mind. Neither were very good in isolation but together they were very musical.
Peter
Peter:Having said all that, and I agree with it, it is not true that all active speakers are going to be better than passive ones!! It is merely easier to avoid making awful ones unless you really don't understand what you are doing!
Of course you're right, you can still make absolute stinkers!!!
However, making EQ adjustments at the signal level (or in the digital domain) allows much greater (and finer) control than attempting the same with power level crossovers etc.
Doing it well is where the skill/knowhow counts!!
I agree - let's face it - the beolab 6000 is a superb example of what a speaker should not look like, A couple of car speakers in a drain pipe is a description I have heard used but despite this, the engineers at B&O have actually produced something that sounds not bad! A passive 6000 would in all probability be hilarious! Active technology allows engineers to tailor the amplifier to the drive unit but also to the enclosure which allows the designs seen at B&O. I am sure Geoff Martin sighs at times when he sees the latest design he has to work with and it is a testament to his skill that B&O speakers sound so good! Imagine the sound if he was given free rein with the design!
I have both active and passive speakers in my house,but have pros and cons.I have the beolab actives, where I don't want a dominating speaker,but decent sound.
A pair of active beolabs at say £3k will never compete with a good amp ,and passives at the same price.Like I said in the past I chose passive speakers with power amps,over lab 5s because they sounded better.
Saying that,Ihave just ordered the new linn akubariks,which sounded better than my old passive and amp setup,and cheaper too.Beolabs are great active as you can get decent sound from a small footprint,which looks good,beolabn3 are sensational for their size.
Peter: .... B&O used to produce speakers for systems which seemed to sound particularly good with the system they were designed for. The Beovox 1200 and Beomaster 1200 spring to mind. Neither were very good in isolation but together they were very musical.
.... B&O used to produce speakers for systems which seemed to sound particularly good with the system they were designed for. The Beovox 1200 and Beomaster 1200 spring to mind. Neither were very good in isolation but together they were very musical.
That is a very good example of the fact that B&O for decades has understood that speakers and the amp are a pair - and not just two components brought together more or less by chance.
Consequently this has lead to the BeoLabs as we know them today.
Actually the BL14 and the15/16 are of the same kind - only the speakers cables are 'a bit longer' than when the amp and the speaker(s) are located in the same unit.
MM
There is a tv - and there is a BV
Hi Graham,
Of course, it's easy to make a mess of anything. So, you can't simply say "active is better than passive" (or vice versa) because the statement doesn't contain enough information. I can say that "a bicycle can go faster than a car" if I know the extra information "if the car is a 2CV going up a "hill" in Switzerland and the bicycle is dropped out of a helicopter".
In addition, as some others have mentioned, the advantage of an active loudspeaker design is not primarily due to the "one-amplifer-per-driver" topology.
The REAL advantage comes in the signal processing (which includes, but is not exclusive to "filtering" or "EQ" or "equalisation" or whatever else you want to call it) that you can apply to the loudspeaker independently to each driver.
To give just a few simple examples:
An active loudspeaker design makes all of these examples MUCH easier (or perhaps "possible") to achieve.
All of that being said, if your electroacoustical behaviour of every component was "perfect" (whatever that means) and if loudspeakers behaved linearly (i.e. they gave you the same frequency response at all listening levels, and they didn't change their behaviours when they heat up, and so on and so on) AND if you did everything properly (meaning that your cabinets were the right size and shape) AND if your production tolerances of every component in the system was +/- 0%. Then MAYBE a passive design could work. ;-)
All of that THAT being said: It's certainly cheaper to stick a woofer, a tweeter, and a couple of electrical components in a box than to stick a woofer and a tweeter and a couple of amplifiers and a power supply and a DSP board and some ADC's and DAC's and whatever else you might need in a box. So a passive design does have THAT going for it...
Hope this helps.
Cheers
-geoff
Thank you for the reply - we are extremely fortunate that you are here with the ability to make the technical sound simple!
Peter: Thank you for the reply - we are extremely fortunate that you are here with the ability to make the technical sound simple!
I'm here for you. (well... occasionally...)
cheers
-g
Peter:I am sure Geoff Martin sighs at times when he sees the latest design he has to work with and it is a testament to his skill that B&O speakers sound so good! Imagine the sound if he was given free rein with the design!
Thanks, Peter - but I certainly don't deserve all of the credit I'm given here. I'm just one person in a great team of people in the acoustics department in Struer. If it weren't for the acoustical, electrical and DSP engineers that I am lucky enough to work with, all I would be able to do is to sit around complaining (and sighing) at work all day.
I know what you mean - as a GP, I certainly could not manage without my team though very unfairly I seem to get most of the credit. I therefore regard Dr McEvedy as an umbrella term! So we can regard Geoff Martin as an overarching concept in future!
I think I want to change my job title:
Geoff Martin, Overarching Concept
Geoff Martin: I think I want to change my job title: Geoff Martin, Overarching Concept
Sounds excellent Thank you very much for your explanation. I learn something new every time I read your posts on Beoworld
Vähintään yhdeksänkymmentä prosenttia suomalainen!
Don't forget the main advantage of passive speakers if you're a dealer or a component swapping audiophile hobbiest...you get to sell the customer an amp, a pair of speakers, and speaker wire and interconnects. If and when the customer decides he needs to spend more money you can convince him to buy new cables, a new amp, another larger amp, two sets of speaker wire if the speaker is biwireable, etc.
I remember early active speakers that were not nearly as competent as the Beolabs, early Advent, AudioPro, Philips, and Braun units. Each sounded better than their passive counterparts, often amazingly so, but we had a hard time selling them as our customers wanted to be able to swap amps and play the high end game, usually with inferior results. Which IMO highlights the philosophical difference between B&O and High End, buy something high performance and just enjoy the music, or make a hobby out of dithering around with the components being more important than the music no matter how much you protest the opposite.
Jeff
I'm afraid I'm recovering from the BeoVirus.
I have to confess that my only real experience of active speakers is in the Beovision televisions (BV5,11, Avant) and the truth is that the results are outstanding in these televisions. The BV11 has plenty of options for fine-tuning to suit personal taste.
Having said that my vintage Beovox speakers also give outstanding results with my old Beomasters. My most used combination is S45s with early type BM2000, more often than not with an old Roku internet radio streamer connected to the tape input.
As Jeff says, buy high- end and just enjoy the music.
Peter: I agree - let's face it - the beolab 6000 is a superb example of what a speaker should not look like, A couple of car speakers in a drain pipe is a description I have heard used but despite this, the engineers at B&O have actually produced something that sounds not bad! A passive 6000 would in all probability be hilarious! Active technology allows engineers to tailor the amplifier to the drive unit but also to the enclosure which allows the designs seen at B&O. I am sure Geoff Martin sighs at times when he sees the latest design he has to work with and it is a testament to his skill that B&O speakers sound so good! Imagine the sound if he was given free rein with the design!
Did I read somewhere that the Beolab 5 was designed around the sound, and not the other way around?
x:________________________
Jonathan:Did I read somewhere that the Beolab 5 was designed around the sound, and not the other way around?
Probably. It's true.
Geoff Martin: Jonathan:Did I read somewhere that the Beolab 5 was designed around the sound, and not the other way around? Probably. It's true. Cheers -geoff
Yes, that's a point that was mentioned on various occasions when the speakers were launched. The final shape and configuration was dictated by various problems that conventional speaker designs are struggling with.
I actually interviewed David Moulton about this, back in 2006, and he confirmed a number of relevant acoustics-directed design cues that were introduced by the B&O team and the ALT-technology. Where Sausalito supplied the thinking behind the ALT technology, the speakers grew out of the Eureka Archimedes Project, in which both B&O and KEF collaborated together with the Acoustics Lab at Aarhus University, from the late 1980s onwards. Here's a sidebar from Stereophile describing where the project was in 1991:http://www.stereophile.com/content/enough-room-sidebar
The heavy, tapered plastic-resin skirt defeats standing waves (taper) and unwanted resonances (dead resin). Conventional speakers hum along with the music, so to speak. The top Magico speakers are trying to do the same inside a conventional shape with a ton of aluminium.The central "spine" of the speakers provides additional rigidity to avoid resonances.The ALT-technology is the greatest departure from conventional designs, in that they spread the sound horisontally, which is acoustically more precise relative to how our ears are designed to perceive sounds. (Humans have spent eons in open spaces, listening for prey and danger, compared to the time we have spent inside rooms).It's always fun to hear people criticize the aluminium disks. "How silly, to provide ringing top hats on a speaker!" And then have them touch them. They are solid and do not ring. (I had fun with that when people came to visit).Likewise, the weight, the downward firing large woofer - and the fact that you have two such woofers, creates a much more believable sound image than what you get with a sole, standalone subwoofer solution.And then there's the DSP, which allows for a correction of the performance of the individual drivers that conventional speakers can't even get close to - including sensing the temperature of the drivers and adjusting for resultant drift.If they had been presented right to the market, those speakers would have revolutionized our perception of speaker technology, to B&O's benefit. Unfortunately, the advertising pushed "you can place them wherever you want," instead of going for the amazing sound reproduction they gave when positioned correctly, in a symmetrical environment, and with sufficient space around the speakers. (Symmetrical placement is crucial to release the potential of the ALT-technology.)
People visiting where I had them set up correctly were always dumb struck. I had many calling to visit again, to bring along their favorite music. One die-hard conventional HiFi audiophile who had spent a fortune (literally, no exaggeration) chasing good sound reproduction in his own listening room, came along together with his brother, who wanted to buy BL5s, and wanted to listen to mine. The audiophile summed up the listening session: So I have basically just been wasting a lot of time and money, then?I comforted him by saying that if your approach to the hobby is to tweak, then BL5s are definitely not a relevant choice. If you want to sit back and enjoy spectacularly reproduced music, then go for them. His brother immediately bought a pair after listening to mine.
The BL5s are the best buy in speakers, anywhere, when one considers what you get for your money, and in particular their discrete footprint in a listening room. You need behemoths, both on the amp and speaker enclosure sides, to get anywhere close with conventional HiFi.
Back in 2003, the BL5s were as far ahead of conventional speaker designs, as the Tesla S is to internal combustion automobiles today.
soundproof: Back in 2003, the BL5s were as far ahead of conventional speaker designs, as the Tesla S is to internal combustion automobiles today.
Even though they may be 10 years old, are there any other current manufacturers that have anything comparable to them?
D
In response to Doonesbury's question, I certainly don't think so.
I've been struck by the lack of an attempt to compete with the BeoLab 5 over the past ten years. There may be some custom offerings that come close to what it can do, but nothing that is available as a manufactured retail package, especially at anything close to the price. The BeoLab 5 seems to me to be unique in that regard, along with it's unique array of features and attributes.
My sense of it is that possible competitors find that to try to surpass it is simply too expensive from an R&D standpoint, and possibly also from a manufacturing standpoint. So, instead, they tend to try to ignore its existence by pretending it's a boutique luxury product that's not really "part" of the loudspeaker industry.
I continue to be very proud of what B&O has accomplished with the BeoLab 5. It probably is the best production loudspeaker ever.
Thanks for listening.
Dave Moulton, Sausalito Audio