Why use active crossovers when passive crossovers require fewer components and amplifiers?
A26 – Active loudspeakers make very efficient use of amplifier power, allow drivers of vastly different voltage sensitivity to be used together, and give maximum control over the motion of each voice coil. A 2-way speaker with passive crossover, for example, may run into amplifier clipping on a big bass note. In this process the high frequency tweeter signal, which is riding on top of the bass waveform, gets chopped off in the amplifier, causing large amounts of very high frequency distortion. This may lead to the unexpected result that the tweeter overheats and is damaged by a 50 W amplifier, yet it would be unharmed if the speaker was driven by a 200 W amplifier. If an equivalent 2-way active system was driven by separate amplifiers with 25 W for the woofer and 25 W for the tweeter, then the woofer may well clip and produce distorted output, but the tweeter with its own 25 W amplifier would never know about it. Often a higher power amplifier is assigned to the woofer to avoid the cli
