Active or passive monitors?

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IanW-UK

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First of all Hi :)

This has probably been asked a thousand times, so sorry if it has :D

My band and I are just about to record an album on my pc. We have set a budget of £300 (about $450 ) to get some nearfield monitors. In general would it be better to get some low end active ones or get some slightly better passive ones? Bearing in mind that if we get the passives we will have to use a hifi amp to drive them.

Also does anyone have any recomendations that would suit classic rock and heavy rock type music?

Many thanks all :)

Ian.........
 
Welcome!

Get bi-amped active ones. Bi-amplifictaion (have one separate amplifier for each of the two elements) makes it much easier to get a good sound, since the two elements will not disturb each other, and the dynamic load that the elements are will be much more predictable, making amp design easier.

Biamplification with separate components is typically extremely expensive. This is the reason that biamplified active monitors more or less have taken over the whole monitor market. It simply is the best value for money you can get in the low end of the market.
 
Two things.

IMO - its a better idea to suit the monitors to the room you will be mixing in rather then choose a monitor that might sound good in the shop. Your acoustics will have a large impact on the sound comming out of your monitors.
In a ill treated room I would think more in the direction of Genelec - 1030, JBL- LSR25p, NS -10 and Tannoy reveal (Passive), in that order. How ever that is my opinion (taste) only. I also have no idea how those monitors fall into your budget.....

As for passive and active - not every manufactor of Amps is also a good "monitor manufactor and the opposite. What I mean is not every active monitor is better then the same model but passive with a better amp supplied.

Bottom line is - try and get them to let you take it home and try them out. Lower freq response in a ill treated room is trouble !.
Don't shy away from those that cant supply the lower freqs.
Try playing the note "A" in all octaves and see how "crystalic" it sounds especially the higher ones. If it sounds to artificial beware..... Test it on neutral music that you know well so you wont be fooled into hearing something that will blindfold you.
Keep the monitors away from the wall, keep them away from corners and keep the volume during the test at a normal listening level (carefull from loud music !).

Good Luck
 
Check out Andy Munro's thoughts on active vs. passive in this SOS article: http://www.sospubs.co.uk/sos/1997_articles/may97/andymunro.html
Also I seem to remember that when Studio Sound did their monitor measurement series the monitors with the best step-responses were all passive.
I'm still gonna get actives, but as seen above it's not necessarily evident that the one approach is better than the other.
 
Passive monitors have two main advantages. First, they are cheaper, even after you buy an amp. Second, the electronics of the amplifier are farther away from the magnets in the speakers, but this is not that big between shielding and proper design.

The main advantages with active monitors are, first, you can use an active crossover, which will have much less coloration, and far fewer artifacts, than the passive crossovers used in passive monitor. This one of the most important differences, and active crossovers can not handle the wattage they would see if they were inside of passive monitors. Active crossovers work at line level. You can also match the size of the power amplifier to the speaker much more precisely, which means you are making more efficient use of the power. In a two way active monitor, you will have an active cross over and two power amplifiers. With a passive monitor you have one amp (which must be sized properly for the driver which requires the most power, which is the woofer) and a passive crossover. The other advantage to active speakers, as bdorman mentioned, is that you do not need to think about amp/speaker matching, which is really best left to people who want to think about it. I sure don't like to bother thinking about it. Of course, if you really wanted to, you could get a system with a good active crossover outside the box, and a couple of good amplifiers, and then you would have most of the advantages of both worlds. This is the most common path taken by manufactures of PA speakers and many studio mains systems. For near fields, I personally prefer active monitors, and I am VERY happy with my Mackie HR 824s.

Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
All things being equal, active monitors are better. The main reasons being that the amps directly drive the speaker drivers and therefore provide better electrical damping, and most importantly, the crossovers are in the preamp stage so are isolated from the complex speaker loads that degrade their performance.

On the other hand, in order to make an active monitor meet a particular price point, the quality of all the components is almost always sacrificed. If fact, the most important components, the speakers drivers themselves, are usually the first to be sacrificed. So, for a given amount of money a passive monitor will usually have better performance than an active monitor, because the driver components will likely be much better.

Personally I think about $1000 is the price range at which you can get a set of passive monitors that begins to approach today's true "high performance". Now lets say you wanted to convert those passive monitors into active ones using good, but not "great" components. Ok, you can send back the passive crossovers and save about $100. That's $900 for drivers and cabinets. As for amplifiers, let's use a Hafler P1500 for the tweeters and a P3000 for the woofers. That's $900 + $450 + $550 = $2000. Finally we need a crossover. Let's pick a Rane AC-22 for $350. We might save $100 on chassis since we can incorporate everything together.

The grand total for our pair of entry level "high performance" active monitors is $2250, and all the prices I used were discount street prices.

Compare this street price to that of many other active monitors and it gives you a good idea of the major sacrifices made in their designs in order to reach their price point.

barefoot
 
I guess you guys did not read the Munro article? :)
He says -- and I have heard the same from other reliable sources -- that the loading between the amp and the speaker beeing to the advantage of the active speaker is a myth. Or it is at least only valid for those who do not really know what they are doing. In a passive speaker you can use the crossover to make the speaker a _more_ agreeable load for the amplifier. However it is indeed true that most active crossovers sound better than the passive ones. You just have so much more freedom in the design.

ps. I think the reason that actives are more pricy than passives, is that in a pair of active speakers you must necessarily have two power supplies, whereas a pair of passive speakers generally are driven by an amp whith one PSU driving both channels. A lot of the money in an amplifier is in making a nice DC voltage! :)
(But I wouldn't take my word for it, I have never built any active speakers.)
 
....I am most certainly not an engineer, but i can offer a little insight based on the mistake that i made. I am your typical home recording guy on a budget. I needed decent monitors but didnt have a ton of dough to spend on them. I liked the tannoy reveals that i demoed at the local store, but took the cheaper route of buying the passive ones w/ a servo 260 amp. I know now that i should have waited til i had more dough. The active reveals do sound better.
 
BasPer said:
I guess you guys did not read the Munro article? :)
He says -- and I have heard the same from other reliable sources -- that the loading between the amp and the speaker beeing to the advantage of the active speaker is a myth. Or it is at least only valid for those who do not really know what they are doing.
Click to expand...
This is what the guy from Dynaudio said, and I'll tell you why he's wrong.

"With an active system, the amplifier drives directly into the loudspeaker, but a driver in itself is a fairly complex load -- the impedance rises rapidly with frequency; it has dynamic and mechanical impedance; it has all kinds of things going on that can't be compensated for with a voltage amplifier. You can do the job with a constant current amplifier, where the loudspeaker acts as a load -- a transmission-line kind of principle -- but most amplifiers don't see an ideal load from a drive unit, so it's not actually true to say that active systems load loudspeakers better. A passive system can actually take into account the characteristics of the driver, so you end up with a much flatter impedance curve."

Yes, a speaker driver is a complex load, but a good voltage source amplifier shouldn't care what the load is. The reason for improved performance from direct drive not to because it creates a nice happy load for the amplifier. The improvement results from the removal of series resistances and other non ideal passive components between and amplifier and driver. Drivers are designed with, and all their pretty response curves and waterfall plots result from, direct drive measurements. Adding passive components may indeed flatten the load seen by the amplifier, but this also complicates and degrades the electromechanical response of the driver. This is even truer with modern drivers which almost ubiquitously derive most of their damping electrically rather than mechanically (you can easily see this from typical specs like Qms=4.9, Qes=0.38, Qts=0.35).

Look at any passive crossover, Dynaudio crossovers included, and you have at least a 90% probability of finding a resistor in series with the tweeter because tweeters are almost always more efficient than woofers. This resistor, which is usually on the order of a few Ohms, WILL degrade the transient response of the tweeter. It's also another source of dynamic compression.

The list could go on and on. But, I think the main reason why most active speakers don't see as much improvement in this respect as they could is because they use cheap integrated amplifiers. Also, you might take the words of a Dynaudio corporate representative with some skepticism, especially when admits "The top three hi-fi speakers in the States are all passive -- and just happen to use Dynaudio drivers". Businesses usually don't go around criticizing their top selling products.

barefoot
 
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