  We examine how the qualitative structure of the Doppler peaks in the angular
power spectrum of the cosmic microwave anisotropy depends on the fundamental
nature of the perturbations which produced them. The formalism of Hu and
Sugiyama is extended to treat models with cosmic defects. We discuss how
perturbations can be ``active'' or ``passive'' and ``incoherent'' or
``coherent'', and show how causality and scale invariance play rather different
roles in these various cases. We find that the existence of secondary Doppler
peaks and the rough placing of the primary peak unambiguously reflect these
basic properties.
