Hi Henry, I gave some subjective impressions over on my build thread:
Soundstage and clarity improvements are immense compared to passive.
With a passive crossover setup, you can only really apply fairly broad corrections to an individual driver’s response and phase response is at the mercy of the combination of the crossover and driver. Crossover slopes are limited too. Steeper slopes require many more components and additional notch circuits may be required to compensate for non-linearities in a driver.
With an active crossover, you can fully linearise each individual driver in both amplitude and phase. You can precisely time align the drivers too by delaying an individual driver’s filter relative to the others. This means that any signal which is split between drivers will have perfect amplitude, time and phase coherence. Crossover slopes can be made very steep to avoid non-linearities e.g. resonances/cone break-ups etc.
The additional benefit with my setup is that the filters are all linear phase
I won’t ever build another passive speaker. Actives are so much better in every respect. Yes, you need more amplifier channels, but you need less power per channel, so overall cost isn’t that much different IME. No need for expensive crossover components either.
Changing a crossover is simple too. Once you have the individual driver responses measured, it’s easy to make changes to the filters. A few more measurements and you can have an entirely new crossover designed, measured and implemented in just a couple of hours.
In my setup, I can also seamlessly switch between filter sets to compare them.