What does he mean by “passive”? A passive crossover is usually built into the speaker, so there is no need to get one for the amps (if you’re using shop bought multi driver cabs, it will already have them built in).
If you’re building your own speakers it’s a question of what will work best for what you want to do – if you are not going to have an engineer present whenever the system is set up for a gig, then passives are the best way to go (once the initial work is done – ie the working out of the best crossover frequency in each box, the speakers can be set up without a great deal of tech knowledge).
If you will have someone with enough technical expertise to set the rig up though, the best way to go is have an active crossover – they are way more efficient than passives, and allow tuning that simply isn’t possible with passives…. Meaning you can do much more with less electrical power – We currently run a 4K active crossover rig, and it puts most 20K passive rigs to shame without even breaking a sweat. Which means we don’t need a 3 phase power supply, don’t have to cart around a couple of tons of amp racks, and don’t need an HGV to get it anywhere….:wink:
BTW – if you are using shop bought speaker boxes and an active crossover, don’t forget to rewire the boxes to bypass the passive crossover that such speaker boxes will undoubtedly have (all the benefits of an active matrix are wasted if there is a passive in each box…:wink:)
