Poll... Active or Passive subs?

Quote:
I agree with you LeeLee. It takesa lot more than just throwing big power at a passive sub. Integrated amps usually have the advantage of being designed for the sub they are driving. (EQ, limiters, crossover, subsonic, ect...)


I just want to get a feel for what everyone is doing. Just for the fun of it.

As I alluded to in my previous post, I think the line between active and passive can be somewhat fuzzy. When I think of a traditional passive sub, I think of something that is generally driven by the main amp via a speaker level crossover. But if you are crossing over at line level, upstream of a dedicated amp just for the sub, I don't think there's a quality difference you can generally imply just because of the location of the amp. In my case, I am using the amp that is designed to be used with the driver, and they are typically installed in the same cabinet (traditional "active" configuration). But there are plenty of other outboard sub amps that aren't necessarily "matched" to the sub being used that contain all the same adjustments, and are just as good (or even better) as the amps that are included in integrated offerings. To me anyway, it's a little easier to define active and passive by the signal path, then within active differentiate between integrated and outboard amps.

I don’t like internal amps at all, its a really bad idea IMO, even crossovers in the speaker box is a bad Idea, its very violent inside a sub cabinet, any components that close to the back wave is absolutely going to suffer from resonances/vibration, never a good thing in the audio chain, even if it isn’t clearly audible, but I bet it is.


Additionally, besides a few subs running some DSP there really is no such thing as a amp specially designed for a driver unless you include the ones that cut all the corners they can to make the amp only do what it has to make the driver go as loud and low as it can as cheaply as possible. I can’t find any real rocket science in powering a sub; the filtering can be added outboard if needed, the rest is academic from my experience. I would bet no plate amp would come close to outperforming many of the top pro amps, in quality and clean high output.