Loudspeakers have we really made that much progress since the 1930s?

Great article by Art Dudley in October Stereophile. He comes down squarely on the side of the best vintage speakers not having been surpassed or even equalled by modern speakers.

What is meant by ’the best vintage speakers’? old Quads? Hartsfields? AR-1s?

The people who designed the classic products sold by Western Electric, RCA, Siemens, Tannoy, and other golden-age companies weren’t just reshuffling the audio-technology deck in an effort to get last year’s consumers to buy next year’s models; they were using all of their engineering know-how and the best materials at their disposal to achieve a breathtaking level of realism in music and speech reproduction. The companies they inspired -- including Altec, Acoustical Quad, Leak, Neumann, Ortofon, Garrard, EMT, Klipsch, Jensen and Marantz -- strove to do pretty much the same.

The result is that, **in certain aspects of their performance,** [emphasis added by me, Al] many audio products made in the 1930s through the 1960s outperform virtually everything made since that time, often by generous margins.

I am in agreement with most of what Art Dudley says about vintage 1930-60's gear, generally speaking, but, the specific examples he mentioned in the excerpts quoted above, are not what I would be setting out as examples.  The Quad? Yes, a terrific sounding speaker if one can accept its volume limitations, requirement to be seated in a very narrow listening window, low image height, etc.  But the Altec Valencia?  If one is limited in experiencing horns to just such speakers, it is easy to see why someone would say that they hate horn colorations.  As for the 755, that is certainly and "interesting" speaker--very clear, dynamic and exciting, but, it is extremely colored and quite limited to the kind of music that sounds good through it (pop vocals, jazz).  If one insists on a single driver vintage system, the 756 is far better sounding to me, although even rarer and more expensive. 

Given the thread of Art Dudley's articles over the years, I do wonder if he has had that much exposure to some of the real gems of the past, such as the 555 field-coil compression driver on a 15A horn, or Jensen M-10 or M-18 field-coil cone drivers, or Western Electric 713a,b,c or IPC compression drivers, or Yoshimura Labs compression drivers.  There is also the monster Shearer system that the original poster mentioned that is certainly a contender for best of vintage gear.

I read somewhere that Art Dudley is planning to review the Auditorium 23 system, which is a modern system that utilizes Line Magnetic knock-offs of the Western Electric 555 compression driver, 22A horn and 597 tweeter.  That should be quite interesting.  I have not heard this system myself; it looks terrific in pictures.  My only issue is that those I have talked to that have heard the Line Magnetic replicas of the Western Electric field coils say that they sound decent, but, nowhere close to what the real drivers can do.  It would be interesting to see if Art Dudley has, as a personal reference, experience with the real deal, without which, it would be hard to frame his comments in any kind of meaningful context--where does the system stand compared to the original masters?  That is the burning question.