passive and active

[t-money]

oh ok

[Cr@sh]

electronic crossovers are more accurate than passives, and you can change the xover freqs. to where you want them.

You must not have read the other posts becuase thats not true. Anyone can deigns and build passives to be just as accurate as active. It's just a lot easier with active.

[qu1cks1lver56]

You must not have read the other posts becuase thats not true. Anyone can deigns and build passives to be just as accurate as active. It's just a lot easier with active.

i know they can be, but i was talking more about crossovers that come with component sets. guess i shouldve said that. but in my experience with them, the electronic crossovers vs. passive sounded much much more accurate, but that was with factory crossovers from a cheap-ish component set.

[Skullz]

Passive crossover points are predetermined points that cant be changed after they are made where the active allows you to control its enter and exit points along with the rolloff slopes. Even the most expensive home speakers still use passive crossovers along with biamp or triamp capabilities. Active allows you to choose the points and slopes at which you want to use for a given speaker in a setup with the turn of a knob. The only real downside to passive is the amount of power they can take.

[raytard]

also, keep in mind, a lot of really high end passives have ALOT of equalization and tuning built into them. Things like crossover points, slopes, and tweeter cuts/gains are normal, but alot of them feature circuitry and parts to change frequency response and impedance spikes

see that crossover? that does a whole hell of alot more than high pass/low pass

the stuff you can do with a crossover is pretty amazing when you get into it, especially flattening out response curves without any additional equalization. Some high-end HT guys design and build their own crossovers with the help of diagnostic devices that measure in room resonances and frequency responses and make the crossover compensate for abnormalities.

upside of that is, any lay person can zero out all their settings, and have a textbook perfect flat response.

but then again, you could do it all active, and use equalization and processing to make it happen. and for most of us running active is the most control or quality you can get. sometimes things as silly as dropping the crossover point 1000 hz, making it 3-rd order, and making the woofer 1-st order will take your tinny, harsh components and make them into warm smooth ones.

passive isnt an across the board power handeling issue, some passives can handle thousands of watts in PA setups.

passive isnt less accurate, only more difficult to adjust or tune.

active is done before the amp, passive is after, and that is the technical difference.

active allows each component (i.e. each woofer, each tweeter, each subwoofer) to be run on its own channel. this usually means more power (since now you are using 2x as many channels of your amp) and more tuning (since you can, for instance, turn the gain of the passenger side tweeter up just a hair if you wanted)