Are advances in technology making speakers better?

@Phusis, if you think those speakers image you have never heard the image of a current state of the art system. Experience is the best teacher. Next, what do you know about CAD when it comes to speakers? Do you actually design speakers? Back in the 60's speaker designers and builders could never afford the computers used in Apollo mission. They cost in the millions. There were no PCs and no CAD programs for speaker design. All they did back them was shove any efficient drivers they could come up in and a box they would fit in with a simple crossover and paint them black.  The most thoughtful designer back then was Paul Klipsch and he even made several mistakes in design that would not be made today by state of the art builders. I remember hearing a home JBL system with that slotted horn they used and it was pretty impressive. I was 16 years old. Whatever, not one of those old speakers could remotely compete with modern speakers. 

There are speakers that are more accurate than others. "Sounding better" is a subjective opinion by an individual who may or may not have any idea what they are listening to. Accurate is not subjective, it is just hard to define in the case of loudspeakers. There are characteristics accurate loudspeakers always have that can be measured, but unfortunately, they do not guarantee accuracy. Accuracy also depends on the recording. Studio recordings are never accurate. They are sonic images painted by recording engineers and as such qualify as art. Live recordings, on the other hand, can be very accurate but it also depends on the recording engineer's skill at maintaining that accuracy. I always try to find live recordings from a concert series I attended and have my favorites to use making that analysis for myself. An example would be Cecile McLorin Salvant's Dreams and Daggers. The sonics are very close to What I heard at the Blue Note in NYC as far as my hearing memory can determine. Great live recording. An accurate system has to be able to match the energy and size of a live performance. It is the rare system that can do that. As a rule this can not be done without subwoofers. Subwoofer drivers did not exist in the 60s. They came along in the late 70's and the drivers did not really reach maturity until the 2000's. Unfortunately, in many systems subwoofers do more damage than good. I wrestled with them for two decades before getting them to perform at the level were they caused no interference with the midrange and handled the bass up to 100 Hz. This is why the manufacturers of many subs tell you to set the sub to 40 Hz. Down there all they are usually pumping out are record warps. With just a low pass filter they are doing nothing to help clean up the main speakers. 

I wonder if people really understand what good imaging is and what good soundstage means. These terms are really thrown around quite liberally.

And balance this against a well recorded piece of music versus mediocre. I think a nicely recorded piece of music achieves more then spending thousands and thousands on amplification and speakers.

It’s a mess and spending tons of money to address poorly recorded music doesn’t solve engineering shortfalls.

@phusis 

Coloration, it could be argued, is many things also by "virtue" of absence: lack of image size and dynamics, scale, ease, physicality, presence, etc. - traits where most modern speakers fall short. You don’t hear it as coloration per se, but when you know the difference it makes you also realize how much less alive, visceral, real and emotional the experience gets.

This is the great danger facing those modern designers who tend to rely too heavily upon measurements.

Modern testing equipment will usually tell you what's wrong with your design but it won't tell you what might be missing.

Sometimes it feels as if too much has been sacrificed on the altar of a good measured response.

Sins of omission and not commission might be easier to live with but too much piety seldom resulted in a good time.

This was a criticism of many British designs of the 1990s and early 2000s. Some may have measured well but they still sounded flat in comparison to their predecessors.

The most important job of the modern designer must surely be this task of reducing coloration without losing the sheer musical joie de vivre that was conveyed by some of the best designs of yesteryear.

This job is certainly not made any easier given the size constraints that are imposed upon virtually every modern design.

How could it be?

Perhaps in order to wholly improve upon a good 1950/60s loudspeaker you have to make a similar sized 2020s loudspeaker.

Ye cannae change the laws of physics Jim.

Not even in the sometimes strange world of audio playback.

@mijostyn wrote:

@Phusis, if you think those speakers image you have never heard the image of a current state of the art system. Experience is the best teacher. Next, what do you know about CAD when it comes to speakers? Do you actually design speakers?

No, I don’t design speakers nor know of the specifics of CAD in their more modern development, but I don’t believe I have to either; my primary concern is to assess the final product, and it also leaves me unaffected of what theory might dictate apart from acknowledging the importance physics, so yes: experience as it relates to perceived sonics, and what’s deduced from this, is the best teacher.

I was going to include (but didn’t get to within the 30 min. deadline for edits) that what I regard as fine imaging mayn’t be up to your standards, but that’s not in my mind to say the EV’s can’t image. If on the other hand yours is a more binary approach where anything other than state of the art imaging equates into no imaging, then I guess the EV’s (and most other speakers, incl. the more modern ones) can’t image.

Back in the 60’s speaker designers and builders could never afford the computers used in Apollo mission. They cost in the millions. There were no PCs and no CAD programs for speaker design. All they did back them was shove any efficient drivers they could come up in and a box they would fit in with a simple crossover and paint them black.

Relative to the expense of speaker development back from the late 20’s on up, less could do. My point is that brilliant people willed the development of excellent designs from a century ago that didn’t see restrictions imposed with regard to size, but rather what was needed of them to fulfill their intended (cinema) use with limited amp power. Replicas of the WE12a’s for example, build with care in hardwoods and with modern Lamar drivers, are regarded as being among the very best sounding speakers around, aided of course by complementary driver/horn sections around their frequency span.

The most thoughtful designer back then was Paul Klipsch and he even made several mistakes in design that would not be made today by state of the art builders. I remember hearing a home JBL system with that slotted horn they used and it was pretty impressive. I was 16 years old. Whatever, not one of those old speakers could remotely compete with modern speakers.

PWK’s self-imposed limitation was that of working with both a size and budget restriction to accommodate domestic consumers, and initially at least working only with all-horn designs this didn’t come unpunished. Even the K-horns are size limited to a fault, whereas the Jubilee’s come closer to being a more true expression of what an all-horn design is capable of. Indeed, even the latest iteration of the K-horns sound "restricted" and more like speakers next to my actively configured and TH subs-augmented EV’s with large format MF/HF horns on top. That’s why I’d always choose a large format pro cinema system, despite being of much older date and situated in a home setting, where the horn sections are more properly sized (the designers themselves would state "just barely"), because to my ears they just sound more uninhibited and real - age of design be damned. Experience, experience - and priorities..

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I always try to find live recordings from a concert series I attended and have my favorites to use making that analysis for myself. An example would be Cecile McLorin Salvant’s Dreams and Daggers. The sonics are very close to What I heard at the Blue Note in NYC as far as my hearing memory can determine. Great live recording. An accurate system has to be able to match the energy and size of a live performance. It is the rare system that can do that.

Regarding accuracy of reproduction I can relate in particular to "energy and size" as vital parameters here, which is also what I strive to achieve in my setup. It might seem paradoxical, but bigger speakers can sound much less like speakers being that the music emanates into the listening space more uninhibitedly and properly sized; the mind is more effectively tricked into believing what’s presented to it is "real" and/or less a reproduction.

As a rule this can not be done without subwoofers. Subwoofer drivers did not exist in the 60s. They came along in the late 70’s and the drivers did not really reach maturity until the 2000’s. Unfortunately, in many systems subwoofers do more damage than good. I wrestled with them for two decades before getting them to perform at the level were they caused no interference with the midrange and handled the bass up to 100 Hz. This is why the manufacturers of many subs tell you to set the sub to 40 Hz. Down there all they are usually pumping out are record warps. With just a low pass filter they are doing nothing to help clean up the main speakers.

High-passing the mains not too low, and high enough for it to have proper impact/effect, is paramount when trying to integrate subs properly. I fully agree and certainly wouldn’t be without this way of configuring the overall speaker system.

@cd318 --

Great post.

There have been tremendous advances regarding materials (with Ceramic, diamond, etc) and we now have tiny woofers that manage to produce some bass (at the expense of sensitivity of course, but still) at reasonable level.

Wether those advances make a loudspeaker more MUSICAL is debatable. I've been listening to a few cost-no-object, last generation loudspeakers and while impressive on many levels, they are sometimes too perfect for their own good... a "recording" being a very imperfect thing to start with, and a pale copy of the real event, sometimes it's better to add a tiny bit of color and distortion to make it palatable.