quote: "did they have much to say about that?"
He didn't have much to say, although the rep for whatever it was they were pushing, I think some test equipment that did Ap-type stuff on the cheap, tried to find out what was bugging me afterwards (ignorance and stupidity maybe?).
Reactances by their nature store energy. If loudspeakers were developed with high Z drive maybe we would have some that worked well with matching power amps. But we have speakers that expect voltage source type drive, the closer to zero output Z the better in principle.
With feedback you can go a step further in the other direction and provide a negative output impedance, say to take the voice coil resistance "out". Again, this is not likely what the speaker designer used, but if you can collaborate with these folks up front, and persuade the end customer that a powered speaker is really the best, you can do some interesting things. This kind of packaging is anathema for the highend brigade, who want to have fun mixing and matching---and who can blame them---it keeps them off the streets. And allows M*nst*r's owner to buy the right to call sports stadiums what he wants, and another Lamborghini.
The problem with "pure digital" is that it is intrinsically open-loop. The straightforward way of applying feedback requires an A/D, and this as well after the output filter. It's hard enough to stably apply analog feedback around a 12dB/octave stopband filter as it is, and the A/D just adds to the issues---the easy cheap ones being sigma-delta and having their own latency problems.
But there are other things you can do, the subject of lots of activity and contention. It will be interesting to see what settles out in the long run.
