Gentlemen, its quite interesting to read the diverse opinions and analysis of how and why active or passive loudspeakers sound the way they do. Some use the good old if you cant convince them, confuse them route and ofcourse as always, there are some good comments too. To me, almost everything relevant about electro-acoustics & amplifiers is already quite well known by the top R&D engineers and researchers in the premium loudspeaker industry. Its not that Genelec technologies are not known or understood by the other top R&D engineers, and likewise its not like the Genelec R&D team are ignorant about any of the technologies developed by other top R&D engineers as information about all premium technologies are somehow available to all the top R&D engineers in their specific fields. Its has to be the case where every loudspeaker manufacturer wants to build & market the best loudspeaker systems, but few can, for various reasons, which is why some loudspeakers have special features & technologies and some dont. Its mostly primarily related to the (funding + development + manufacturing + marketing + management) capabilities of the company and quite rarely due to lack of knowledge. There are other secondary factors too which are not essentially relevant to this discussion. Pandam used to be a loudspeaker manufacturer before, so we have operated these factors and know them well. We started with passive loudspeaker systems and tried to progress to active loudspeaker systems and there was no turning back for us when we developed an in-depth understanding of what are the advanced possibilities when you use certain technologies that can be properly applied mainly to active loudspeakers. Hope you are able to attend the seminar where Clifford & myself will try to present some interesting substantiated information when we have the opportunity. I am sure it will be great food for thought for some of you.
If you can download the paper (Application of Negative Impedance Amplifiers to Loudspeaker Systems) by Werner & Carrell (1958) from the AES E-Library, there you can start to have an understanding of how complex the mated Genelec driver + amplifier design are, where both are sophisticatedly tailored for each other. The G speaker will have a different performance on a standard amplifier & the G amplifier could oscillate & burn out of you try to play it on a different speaker. But when used the way they are designed to be used, the performance is outstanding and the superb results are hard to ignore.
Another thing that caught my attention is lots of emotional words generalizing that studio loudspeaker monitors might be dry, cold, un-musical, un-natural, colored, sharp, bright, course, rough and lack spacing, layering, darkness, front to back, tone etc. If you take all the studio loudspeaker monitor brands mentioned in this thread, the bits and pieces in found in all these brands cover almost the entire spectrum of crossover types, internal & external amplifier types, driver types, waveguide types, enclosure types and speaker system sizes that correspond to what makes up most stages of most kinds of good home hifi loudspeaker systems. It would be interesting to be enlightened as to what parts or stages of a 'studio loudspeaker monitor' suddenly deteriorates all the things those emotional words describe.
Another thing that caught my attention is the perception of how only home passive hifi loudspeaker systems can reproduce the front to back depth & layering in all music played on them, but active studio monitors cannot. I fail to understand how this front to back depth & layering phenomenon is always obtained from all music on passive hifi speakers and not on any studio active loudspeaker monitors. How does the recording / mix engineer hear the front to back depth & layering in the studio and work on it while recording / mixing if his active studio monitors cannot reproduce it? You will agree that the recording / mix engineer has to put in some amount work on the front to back depth & layering during the recording / mixing process to get it into the final audio track if your passive hifi speakers have to reproduce it. Can anyone enlighten me about how this process goes and how it is achieved? I have spent a lot of time with many great studio engineers from various kinds of premium studios and extensively discussed recording and mixing techniques with them and find that they rarely use spatial miking kits or special processors for front to back depth & layering. Discrete close miking for each instrument not only does away with microphone proximity effect problems, but also greatly improves the signal to noise ratio of the recording and allows each individual instrument to directly feed to the mixing console allowing accurate level, tone control & processing to all the instruments individually in the mix. All this is not possible when a single spatial microphone kit is used to mike the entire orchestra. When discrete microphones are used on each instrument, front to back depth & layering of the entire orchestra is lost with this technique. So again, can anyone enlighten me about how this is achieved in the studios, for all music to be reproduced with front to back depth & layering from all passive hifi loudspeaker systems?
