...People who care about sound quality want the flexibility to find that perfect amp (or find the perfect speakers for the amp they love). The mass market wouldn't know what to do with powered speakers if you gave them away - because they have a 2 or 7.1 channel receiver in their system....
In the audiophile environment, these are certainly the facts of the market, but the logic is highly flawed. The ideal approach is to start with a digital signal from a surround processor, etc, and feed that to a digital, active loudspeaker. This can offer first, crossovers in DSP that would be impossible in analog, and you can also carry out all kinds of innovative filtering and processing to handle speaker protection, bass enhancement, etc etc. Then you run a D/A for each frequency band and feed those signals to a set of amplifiers to handle each driver. With the amps next to the drivers and directly coupled to them, you can model their performance exactly and exert far more control. You can run far lower powers and get louder results. In addition, you are looking at a complete system that just needs a good digital input, rather than a hodge-podge of bits from different manufacturers, all with their own foibles and weirdnesses. You can't build a system from disparate bits by trying to choose components that cancel out each others' wrongnesses and hooking them together with exotic cables: it simply doesn't work - although this is usually what people do. For more info, see http://www.meridian-audio.com/w_paper/DSP_speakers_scr.pdf
None of this seriously applies to the SB market however.
--Richard E
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
