Can you connect your active monitors directly to your Elektron gear?

[Speldosa]

@Funkyswitches

Now, before I go on, ask any questions you have based on what I’ve written so far…

Thanks for your answer. I agree on/already knew all that you said.

@Funkyswitches

It’s gonna blow up if you go to anything higher the +4dBu! Never in the history of professional sound reinforcement has a signal exceeded +4du…

I don’t believe that I’ve said that a signal never can exceed +4dBu. I’m talking about constantly, everyt day, feeding the speakers a signal that is much higher than this. Exactly how high is of course hard to say, since I realize that the max output designates peak values rather than average values, especially if you’re not playing, I don’t know, white noise at the highest internal volume (that is, turning up all the mixer tracks to max), or whatever would be needed to get a constant signal of the highest max output.

@Funkyswitches

The dial on your monitor which is marked for +4Bu is a volume knob. The question is about the input gain- that is where distortion comes from (the kind of distortion that destroys speakers).

We could remove the actual output volume (air beeing pushed around) from the equation all together. Just imagine that the volume knob always is turned down to zero, and that my overarching question is what voltage I can constantly feed my speakers before they break (if there’s a limit, which there seems to be).

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@Starscream

Just chime in to say for me I’ve used active Near Fields with a sub woofer all these years directly plugged into my synth gear. No issues.

I do understand that it’s no problem if you let the manifested sound volume be a sort of natural indicator that you’re inputting too hot of a signal (in which case the sound will be too loud for comfort, forcing you to turn it down). As I stated in my original post, however, I’m looking for a solution where the sound volume never can be louder than a certain dB SPL (where this volume is much, much lower than when you might suspect that the speakers are being damaged).

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@Stone262

I don’t understand why you want to have the Syntakt volume on max and then adjust the volume on the back of the speakers?

@Speldosa

I want to set up my speaker so that they never, no matter how loud of an input signal I feed them, will play above a certain dB SPL.

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@Stone262

The other thing to consider with having an attenuator between the Syntakt and your monitors is that means to avoid a rare and random peak output that might never happen, you will be constantly feeding the monitors a lower level input signal than they particularly want. That just means the amps will be constantly working harder to amplify to the volume you want. Still in their normal range I’m sure but still.

Yes, my thinking right now is that I’ll probably buy a hardware limiter that I place in between my Syntakt and my speakers, that I set once and then forget/don’t touch. This should stop any random peaks from getting through. I started this thread to ask for a suitable device.