So most of the pieces of my system have finally arrived (sub to come later when I can afford it) and I'm ready to tackle the install. I've got a few friends who've had experience coming over, but I'm curious as to which way you guys think I should go with this setup... active or passive. Here's what I've got:

HU: Pioneer P880PRS
Components: CDT Audio ES620 Eurosports
Amp: Soundstream Van Gogh VGA 800.5

Originally what I was thinking was that I'd bridge the amp to get 2 x 200W RMS to the two components, and use the CDT crossovers, and when I get my sub I'll have ~400W RMS for the sub channel. I'd leave the P880PRS in 'standard mode'.

After doing some reading on potential setups though, I've started seeing that I may be able to run an active setup with the P880PRS. In this case, I wouldn't bridge the amp and I'd get 4 x 50W RMS to the components and 200W for the sub channel. I'm a little bit worried that this isn't enough power to these components though as I've heard they're very power hungry. What do you guys think?

 

not familiar with the components and amp, Just remember that you have to set the HU to NW mode and remove the passive crossover from the component set.

 

It never hurts to try they say.
I'm running active and would never go back. It's so much fun wasting time by sitting on your driveway listening and tuning.
But here you have the power issue. Is getting another amp out of the question?
While the mids might be power hungry, I haven't seen too many tweeters that require gobs of power. You might try and get a little amp just for tweets and bridge the 5ch to mids.
On the other hand if you are not really into tuning and faking around with your system, leave it on passives.

Anyhow, I'm all for active.

 

x 2

Mark

 

50 watts should be enough to get plenty of output from your mids.

I would go active just like everyone else has said. You might want to try it both ways to hear the difference for yourself, that way no regrets and you get +1 experience points haha.

When I went from passive to active with the kicker resolution set a few years ago, it was almost a night and day difference. Not so much so with my canton set, obviously it varies depending on the passive xover.

 

making changes on passive xo's is a lot more involved, and difficult, opopsed to an active setup.. especially when designing your own, a passive setup will be a lot harder to get right without a lot of knowlege and a good understanding of passive crossovers. whereas making changes in an active setup is quite easy and you get instant results, good or bad.

Mark

 

A good start may be to find the slope and X-over points of the passives and use that as a reference point

 

I have tried to do that with a few companies, and they wouldn't part with that information...

Mark

 

I've never had trouble getting x-over points/slopes for any decent brand. A good amount of the time you can find them in the manuals.

 

Focal wouldn't tell me. Alpine wouldn't either.

Mark

EDIT: but alpine does list xo info for some of their speakers in the manual...