One of the finest full range speakers ever made in solid rosenut veneer. Throw your amps away! Excellent condition. Paradigm Premier J20 stands are negotiable. $1500
From the Soundstage review:
They easily compete with passive speakers I’ve heard costing upwards of $6000, maybe more. And the Active/40s don’t even need an amplifier because it’s built in, so their value is even greater, making the Active/40s are a screaming hot deal.
Serious audiophiles know that the amplifier/speaker interface is crucial. If you use the wrong amp, you can get atrocious results, even with great speakers. So imagine that instead of guessing which amp to use with your speakers, you let the designer, who knows the speaker inside and out, take care of choosing it for you. And instead of that engineer having to design the crossover to interact with the huge output of a power amp, he creates the crossover to work with line-level power, something that the folks at Paradigm say is better because it allows them to tailor everything with far more accuracy. So, for a designer who is skilled at loudspeaker and amplifier design, active speakers are ideal in terms of amplifier/speaker mating.
Each Active/40 measures 21.5"H by 8.25"W by 13.25"D and weighs in at a hefty 55 pounds, largely due to the amps mounted to the back inside. The speaker uses a 1" aluminum-dome tweeter and two 6.5" woofers -- one with a mica-polymer cone and the other with a polypropylene cone -- all of which Paradigm designed and manufactured. The Active/40 is a 2.5-way design. What this means is that both woofers operate through the lowest frequencies to give the best bass possible. But as the frequency increases, one of the drivers is rolled off and the other travels into the midrange region by itself -- sort of like engines dropping off a rocket, I guess. The tweeter handles what’s above all that. The crossover is a third-order design with the main crossover point at 1.5kHz. Additionally, one woofer crosses electro-acoustically at 400Hz, while the other woofer handles everything up to 1.5kHz. Like all Paradigm models, the Active/40s have been designed for wide and even dispersion, something that the company learned while working closely with Canada's National Research Council and Floyd Toole back in the 1980s.
There are two solid-state amplifier modules in each Active/40 speaker: 50 watts for the tweeter and a 125 watts for the midrange/woofer section. Therefore, each speaker is biamped with enough power to drive it to excruciatingly loud levels.
If you want to move into something that approaches cost-no-object type performance for nothing near the commensurate price, check out the Active/40. In terms of high-end speakers, the Active/40s are actually cheap -- and even cheaper yet because they have their own amplifiers. Go ahead and compare the Active/40s to speakers that cost up to $6000, perhaps more, and I'll wager that they more than hold their own against most -- and in many cases they will likely come out the winner. Not even contemplating price, the Active/40 is an outstanding speaker. Considering what it costs -- and what you get -- it’s a steal.
