A Fine Romance

ince stereo came out—roughly around the same time as —audio systems have typically included a couple of speakers and some sort of separate amplifier. While this arrangement still works well, audio product designers started a couple of decades ago to toy with the idea of building an amplifier into a speaker. For reasons we’ll discuss below, the concept quickly became the norm in professional recording monitors. But even though every speaker and amplifier designer I know believes that “powered” or “active”