The argument that turntables/records are hopelessly obsolete is reasonable but not as clear cut as many would like to believe. However to extend this argument to active vs passive crossovers is silly. There is nothing "scientifically more evolved" about active crossovers as compared to passive ones. Both have advantages and disadvantages and both are very old ideas that can be used to create "SOTA" speaker systems. There are other ways to build SOTA speakers including full range speakers which eliminate the crossover issue entirely. The definition of science is "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment". In the case of SOTA audio the more you study and observe sound reproduction technology and psycho acoustics the more interesting and nuanced it becomes which is the opposite of using "science" to declare one technology "more evolved" and another "obsolete".
It’s a bit on purpose I provoke by stating that passive networks are not state of the art (because I know that people’s view on a matter is decided by the Investment they already did, not current fact or science!). But I back up my provocation with sources, like here:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...the-art-loudspeakers.6363/page-10#post-143984
Take a look at what AES Fellow John Watkinson wrote:
«As sounds add linearly in the air in front of the drive units, it follows and indeed it is obvious, that one of the fundamental requirements of a crossover is that it should produce a pair of electrical signals that, if added, would reproduce the original audio waveform. A crossover that can do that is called a constant-voltage crossover.
It came as a surprise to me when I discovered, some time ago, that it is fundamentally impossible to obtain such a pair of signals from any passive crossover. In other words, passive crossovers cannot and do not work because they fail to provide the signals necessary for the drive units to linearly add together again. Passive crossovers will always be audible because in the vicinity of the crossover frequency the input waveform cannot be reproduced correctly. Passive crossovers have various other drawbacks including unwanted DC resistance that reduces the damping factor of the woofer and common impedances that reflect woofer distortion currents into the tweeter».
Can an audio reproduction system that by design is coloured, be transparent? No, that’s a contradiction. And that’s why science based engineers started working on and writing about active design well over half a century ago. Did all these engineers get it wrong (Allison, Ashley-Kaminsky, Martikainen, Toole, Watkinson)?
You have strong opinion on this matter. Where is your strong argument?