PASSIVE SBL's could occasionally be a touch woolly in comparison with the active version, especially if you had a sound balance in-room that didn't allow them to screech or scream as they could so easily, but I appreciate the pair you heard featured better crossovers as I recall. That two-box bass loading Naim inflicted on us for some time didn't really work, as there's always a delay in the lower chamber 'getting' the air 'push' from the top box - IMO.

The only way to hear recorded bass properly is on a decent digital recording, or an impeccably mastered digital transfer from a really good analogue recording. I'm not doing an analogue-digital thing here, but almost all LP records have all sorts of things done to them in the bass to get the signal as cleanly on the disc as possible without causing cheap old groove-grinders to jump or to use up too much 'land' on the vinyl end product. That's hopefully why 12" 45's could be great, as all the limiters could be switched off and a good deep cut made if the engineer was good. Sorry, I'm drifting off again, but it's my view that many perceived cable differences are going to be swamped out by source and speaker imperfections - in my opinion (I think )