Loudspeakers

We're increasingly seeing speaker designs, like the Triton Reference, in which passive midrange and treble drivers are married to an active bass section, with integral power amplification. It's a practical downside that the speaker now needs a mains connection as well as a signal connection, but in performance terms there are distinct advantages. There are the usual active benefits of improved drive unit damping, having an amplifier 'dimensioned' for the driver(s), freedom from passive low-pass crossover issues and the easy provision of fixed EQ to extend bass response. Even better, if the bass section isn't just active but equipped with user-adjustable equalisation, the speaker can be made adaptable to room positioning and room acoustics in a way that passive speakers – where the only tuning available, if any, typically involves constricting reflex port output with foam bungs – never are. It's a half-way house to full active operation, which offers benefits throughout the frequency range, but a cost-effective compromise with clear user benefit. KH