Sound pipe=OK
Electronically controlled sound pipe?= Cheesy
There's not really much difference, IMO. As far as I can tell from the press release, the "electronically controlled" part just means that there's a flap in the pipe that opens and closes to increase or decrease the sound level.
What's really cheesy, IMO, is BMW's system of playing "engine sound" through the car's stereo. And it's not even real-time engine sound that is amplified. Rather, it's
pre-recorded "engine sounds" that are stored on a chip somewhere and played back when the computer decides. Now that is crazy!
And apparently VW has gone a similar route in the newer GTIs. My 2010 GTI has a straight-forward "noise pipe", which doesn't bother me, but from what I understand, the newer ones have a dedicated speaker under the hood that "plays" engine sounds.