People telling you that speakers have come a long way in the last decade are full of it.
The average commercial speaker is still two or three cheap Danish danish drivers stuck in a dynamics-killing MDF box selling for 10-20x the cost of the drivers.
Of course there are many commercial speakers that can't be described that way. But count me among those with a lot of experience who believe that modern speakers have really made a wrong turn. Yes, if you value extremely flat frequency response *above all else* they do a respectable job, but that is not at all what makes for a convincing reproduction of live acoustic music.
This leads us to high-efficiency speakers. Which are, yes, represented among modern manufacturers - too many to list. Although many are hair-shirts and many more have some serious weaknesses, most who enjoy and are regularly exposed to live, unamplified acoustic music and experience a good HE speaker come to prefer it to any of the run-of-the-mill non-HE names. You just cannot get proper macrodynamics out of speakers in the ~90 dB/W range no matter the power you feed them, as thermal compression has its way. At least this was an unescapable conclusion for me in A/B-ing such speakers against HE brethren, be they back horns, front horns, or simple OB. The latter make drum thwacks sound like drum thwacks, the former sound like a muffled thwack in comparison. I can certainly enjoy music on these types of speakers - especially more compressed music not attempting to mimic unamplified instruments - they just don't create as real a reproduction.
I'm well-off on a rant now but here is where it is going: there are many vintage speakers available that are HE and sound better than anything currently made at comparable prices. I'm speaking of Altecs and a couple of the Klipsch models although I don't care overall for most Klipsch (shouty).
I would take Altec Model 19s which can be had for $1000-$2000 over any current production speaker I can think of up to... well, let's just say quite a bit more than that. To say that modern drivers are "better" than the drivers in this speaker is a lot of hooey if you value timbre, tone, nuance, and dynamics. There are good modern drivers but the drivers in speakers like the 19 are fabulous in absolute terms. They have alnico magnets which are superior to any form of neo (alnico magnets are extremely pricey today) and paper and other natural fibers (hemp) trumps all synthetic cone materials for natural timbre (as smart companies like Audio Note and Zu, and manufacturers using drivers from Fostex, Lowther, etc., know). It is simply nonsense to say that modern drivers outclass these types of drivers.
Downside to a speaker like the 19? Condition may not be great unless immaculately cared for and they are BIG. That's because they are from the area where sound quality, not aesthetics, was paramount, and a speaker must be large to be efficient and have large, low-distortion drivers.
The average commercial speaker is still two or three cheap Danish danish drivers stuck in a dynamics-killing MDF box selling for 10-20x the cost of the drivers.
Of course there are many commercial speakers that can't be described that way. But count me among those with a lot of experience who believe that modern speakers have really made a wrong turn. Yes, if you value extremely flat frequency response *above all else* they do a respectable job, but that is not at all what makes for a convincing reproduction of live acoustic music.
This leads us to high-efficiency speakers. Which are, yes, represented among modern manufacturers - too many to list. Although many are hair-shirts and many more have some serious weaknesses, most who enjoy and are regularly exposed to live, unamplified acoustic music and experience a good HE speaker come to prefer it to any of the run-of-the-mill non-HE names. You just cannot get proper macrodynamics out of speakers in the ~90 dB/W range no matter the power you feed them, as thermal compression has its way. At least this was an unescapable conclusion for me in A/B-ing such speakers against HE brethren, be they back horns, front horns, or simple OB. The latter make drum thwacks sound like drum thwacks, the former sound like a muffled thwack in comparison. I can certainly enjoy music on these types of speakers - especially more compressed music not attempting to mimic unamplified instruments - they just don't create as real a reproduction.
I'm well-off on a rant now but here is where it is going: there are many vintage speakers available that are HE and sound better than anything currently made at comparable prices. I'm speaking of Altecs and a couple of the Klipsch models although I don't care overall for most Klipsch (shouty).
I would take Altec Model 19s which can be had for $1000-$2000 over any current production speaker I can think of up to... well, let's just say quite a bit more than that. To say that modern drivers are "better" than the drivers in this speaker is a lot of hooey if you value timbre, tone, nuance, and dynamics. There are good modern drivers but the drivers in speakers like the 19 are fabulous in absolute terms. They have alnico magnets which are superior to any form of neo (alnico magnets are extremely pricey today) and paper and other natural fibers (hemp) trumps all synthetic cone materials for natural timbre (as smart companies like Audio Note and Zu, and manufacturers using drivers from Fostex, Lowther, etc., know). It is simply nonsense to say that modern drivers outclass these types of drivers.
Downside to a speaker like the 19? Condition may not be great unless immaculately cared for and they are BIG. That's because they are from the area where sound quality, not aesthetics, was paramount, and a speaker must be large to be efficient and have large, low-distortion drivers.