In this study, the possibility of using an active front-end rectifier to control the speed of a direct current motor is proposed. The proposed method improves the input current, ensuring its waveform is closer to a sine wave than in the existing methods, and reduces the size of capacitors (which are large and expensive). Further, the proposed method exhibits a similar or better performance than the existing methods in terms of speed, torque, input current, and load current control. The rectifier unit’s switch is directly controlled to make the input-side current waveform similar to a sine wave, thereby providing high-quality current that includes few harmonics. The PSIM software was used to perform computer simulations for a comparative analysis of the characteristics of the existing methods and proposed method, and the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified.