It's my understanding that you need a high quality, expensive amplifier for passive monitoring speakers. I've been told that a nice hi fi amp will do the trick, but idealy you'd want a power amp from a company that makes products just for studio stuff, like haffler. People say that in an ideal situation your power amp would have double the power of your speakers handling ratings. So for the passive 75 watt per channel yorkies, you'd have a 150 watt at 8ohms amplifier. Well that is going to cost you a lot more than the active yorkvilles JUST for the amplifier. I mean the hafler ta-1600 is only 60 watts per channel, and if you pay more than that then your paying more than you would just to get the actives! I'm having this same debate right now myself, i have a very large post below this one that no one seems to be responding too, i guess i rambled on a little too much...
But anyways yea the actives have the amplifiers built in, and the amps were matched to the speakers to be as accurate and flat as possible. They have all kinds of fancy limiters and dip switches which you wouldn't have if you got the passives and a seperate power amp, plus they are Bi Amped, meaning there is a seperate amp for the tweeter and the midrange/bass driver, supposudly making it more accurate. Apparantly it distorts very little at high volumes, due to the fact that the amplifiers were built and installed in the speakers by yorkville, and designed for that very purpose.
Also you need some sort of volume control though. You'd need something like a passive preamp or a mixing board to control the volume of active speakers, OR if you got the passives, you'd need to get an integrated amp with a volume control on it, to control the volume, or get a regular power amp such as a hafler ta-1600 and then also get a passive preamp or a mixing board to control the volume of that! So either way it seems that you'll have to be buying some sort of mixing board/passive preamp device.
Which one is actually better? Is the active route, with all the fancy biamping, crossovers, limiters, matched amplifiers, and all that crap really going to give you a much clearer, flatter sound, that will distort less at high volumes? I have no fucking clue. Maybe the passive yorkies with a good power amp would be exactly the same? this is something i'd like to know as well, but from the reading i've done it seems that logically the actives "should" be a little bit better, if not a lot. AND, once you buy the passives, a power amp, and then some sort of device to control the volume they'd most likely end up being the same price or more than the actives, and if you actually get an amp which is twice as powerful as the rating of the speakers, you'd be paying a LOT more...
Any help?