As far as i can reason, active is more/very cost effective for what it offers. Has anyone ever priced metal cases for amps-$100 a piece starting on up? Making a speaker cabinet a little bigger to compensate for the amps volume is alot cheaper-MDF costs less then metal. Not to mention it cleans up alot of listening room clutter of equipment and gets the speaker cable runs down to a few feet (two feet of good 14g cable is probably as good as 12 or 14 feet of high-performance wire). It also eliminates the needs for zobels in many cases and allows the designer to design the amp with a specific driver in mind, increasing performance more.
And with the active crossover, all it needs is a volume nob to become a preamp. The performance gains are just too great to be ignored. And its shocking that you find pieces of crap $70,000 speaker using passive networks. People pay obscene amounts of money for crap. The best active crossover would smoke the best passive crossover for less money. Burmester has an $80,000 pr of speaker using a $300 raven r-2 ribbon tweet and two seas excel aluminum cones (<$200 each) per side plus the lf section and passive crossover, all for $80,000. Its obvious that the best products for the money don't always win in a free market economy, which I though was one of the underlying ideas/virtues behind such. Company images and ideologies sell better.
And with the active crossover, all it needs is a volume nob to become a preamp. The performance gains are just too great to be ignored. And its shocking that you find pieces of crap $70,000 speaker using passive networks. People pay obscene amounts of money for crap. The best active crossover would smoke the best passive crossover for less money. Burmester has an $80,000 pr of speaker using a $300 raven r-2 ribbon tweet and two seas excel aluminum cones (<$200 each) per side plus the lf section and passive crossover, all for $80,000. Its obvious that the best products for the money don't always win in a free market economy, which I though was one of the underlying ideas/virtues behind such. Company images and ideologies sell better.