Thanks - I understand.
Have you been able to compare with more modern speakers like Kudos? - the suggestion being that more modern passive crossovers are less detrimental and, therefore, active is of less benefit.
Having heard only small passive Kudos,and what I understand Kudos also benefit a lot when active.
I think there is a reason Kudos now manufacture their own active filters.
I have also heard the DBL´s have a much more engaging and live sound than the top Kudos .
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Thanks.
Back to your DBL scenario, my thinking is that whilst the 500 will provide a superior input stage and better preserve the ‘drama and emotion’ (as you say), the active 250/DBL can better it via a moderate source or pre-amp upgrade, now or in the future. Yet, there is no way to completely get around the downsides of the passive crossover.
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I don’t think that is true As an active XO can be designed to do exactly the same as any passive, or more, and more easily. In fact copying a passive’s parameters is normally the starting point in setting up to convert to active, though it could deliberately be made different: XO crossover characteristic (Butterworth, Linkwitz-Riley etc), XO frequencies, cutoff slopes, time delay (phase), attenuation, and, though uncommon, any additional filtering can all be set, whether in hardwiring in the AXO’s design or adjustable to meet different speaker requirements.
With an analogue AXO some of the above parameters (1st, 3rd and last) have to be designed in and can’t be tweaked, so if not the same as the passive then the AXO won’t mimic it (though that doesn’t mean not as good, and possibly could be better). SNAXO I believe only has time delays (phase) and levels user adjustable, and although XO frequencies are alterable it is a factory job to do so. In some other passive AXOs, e.g the ATC EC23, the XO frequencies can also be set by the user.
With a decent digital AXO all parameters can be set at will, so can readily be tweaked to match any passive, as long as all details of passive are known, or can be tweaked ‘live’, even in-room, to give best response. Tweaking of some of these parameters in digital AXOs is so much easier and less time consuming than analogue and evenmore so passive ones, so much that with passive it might not have been be done at all as fully as possible, while alternative settings are limited by available component values, e.g. capacitors, unlike the effectively continuous variability of a digital AXO. Actually I imagine many speaker manufacturers these days will use digital active XOs when designing and initially testing speakers, to then build a passive to best approximate the AXO’s settings - certainly that’s what I would do.
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Good points. Thanks IB.
I suppose they could design the passive speaker, then move onto active, and then perhaps fine tune other areas, but not the crossover.
I’ve never heard of a passive/active speaker where the active conversion included anything more than removing the passive crossover.
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As I understand it ,Naim developed their speakers with active crossovers, then they made the passive crossovers.
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Even with 3x300 i suppose
Just hypothesising, but passive SBLs sounded a bit thin to me, even with period Naim amps and LP12. Maybe active fills them out that bit more…
I recall the designer of the Linn 109 speaker saying it was internally signed off in active mode with 6100 amp so perhaps it was a similar approach to the SBLs.
Not really Murmur. Cleaner and faster but the dry character will remain.
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Yes,the active SBL´s goes deeper and tighter and sounds much more live and musical, the same with the Naim Intro,Naim IBL,Linn Kan ,Linn Sara,Royd Eden…
You’ve heard all those speakers active have you?
Yes I have owned them and driven them in various active configurations, and now active DBL’s
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Right 
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I heard DBLs driven active by 3 x 250 25 years ago . Special! Also I have a friend in Israel who drives them with 3 x 500 ( non dr). He loves his. A much under appreciated speaker IMO
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That was certainly the case with the NBL but I don’t think it was with the others.
Personally, I didn’t really get on with the NBL (sorry Phil!). That is until I heard them active, and then they made much more sense to me. Asking about why this might be, I recall being told that development of the NBL passive crossover was not without some difficulty (maybe as a consequence?) and it underwent at least one major revision during its life in an attempt to improve it.
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It seems strange that they would develop the NBL in another way than the other Naim speakers with removable passive crossovers .On DBL the passive crossovers were optional.
Different designer.
In the early stages of nearly all loudspeaker development, an off the shelf configurable active crossover is used. When you are still selecting drive units and matching different ones and figuring out how the enclosure reacts, there are far more changes that need to be made than would practical with building hundreds of passive crossovers. There is usually a huge enough number of iterations of any passive crossover when the desired crossover behaviour is known. When it’s still unknown, it would be unworkable.
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Thanks,that make sense.