What is the Difference Between Active and Passive Monitors?

[Weird Musician]

I'm looking on getting some monitors in my basement studio,
someone made the comment that I have all this other hi-fi recording equipment but I'm still using crappy 30$ computer speakers with a subwoofer.

I've been looking at different brands, some say passive, some say active. Do the passive have to have an amp?
Are the active does that mean they are powered?
I'm looking for a pair priced around 200-300$
What's a good set for that price?

Thanks,
The Weird Musician

 

[dobro]

There are two sets of terms:

active and passive
powered and unpowered

The last two are easiest to understand. If the monitors are powered, they contain their own power amp. Unpowered ones don't.

Active and passive refer to something called crossover, meaning splitting the signal into different frequency bands. The monitor separates the low and high frequencies, in other words, and routes them to woofer and tweeter. In a passive monitor there's a simple lowpass/highpass EQ filter that does this job on the signal as it comes from the power amp, but in an active monitor, each frequency band (each speaker, in other words) has its own amp.

So there's all sorts of possibilities:

passive and unpowered (you have to buy a separate power amp)
passive and powered
active and powered
active and unpowered (this one's unusual, I think)