How much have speakers improved over the past decades?

[PeterZui]

Yes it’s well known that active speakers can only play active music and passives , passive music.
Keith

I think both systems can play both kinds of music. For me the passive speakers have less tendency to ruin the timbre of an acoustic instrument.
You showed your personal preference and perception here which are shared with JohnBooty and Hugo 9000.

To the three of you: Where is the audio scientist in this answer ?

 

[PeterZui]

Whenever I get a reply such as this I find myself wishing that "the internet" had some central location upon which a meteor would fall.

Do you really think I meant that all high-end drivers are made out of paper and that's the only thing people like?
I made this up from your statement which was (from my perspective) very firm.

Come on.

The list of high-end paper cone woofer manufacturers is extensive: Morel, Scan-Speak, SEAS. And so on. And those woofers are used by many other companies in turn: for example you'll find Scan-Speak drivers in Wilson Audio speakers and those from many other high-end manufacturers. If you'd like to know more, check out the high-end drivers available at Madisound. Many, not all, are paper cones.

ASR deserves better than the kind of toxic internet discourse where you assume everybody else is an idiot and jump all over one slightly vague sentence with four nasty paragraphs of your own. Good discussions don't happen that way.


Please treat your fellow ASR members with respect unless you have some kind of reason not to.
Then please don't make such (and from my perspective clueless) statements if you think ASR members deserve otherwise.

I said, "I've not seen anything to suggest that driver construction has improved too much in the last 20 years."

From my perspective you cannot see it but surely can hear it ....................too silly............OK, don't take it personal

I didn't claim there's been no progress. Of course there has been some. But hi-fi systems were already reproducing audio with excellent fidelity 20+ years ago. There aren't a lot of breakthroughs left to be made in traditional loudspeaker design. Unless somebody comes up with a radically new type of speaker, the primary progress we'll see over the next 20+ years will be a continuation of the trend of hi-fi audio features trickling down to lower price points. The JBL 3-series speakers are a good example of performance in a $149 speaker that would not have been imaginable 20 years ago.

As for what all the audio engineers of the world are doing, the vast majority are not working in high-end audio designing big fancy woofers for home hi-fi setups, I can tell you that much. Ultra high-end drivers are an extremely niche product and that is one reason why progress has not been revolutionary in that area. How many drivers did Scan-Speak ship last year? Probably less than the number of iPhones Apple sells in an hour.

For decades now the majority of audio engineering resources have been poured into embedded audio. Car audio, bluetooth speakers, the speakers in your phone and laptop, etc. These markets utterly dwarf big home hi-fi speakers by multiple orders of magnitude. And, while those miniature speakers will never match a nice set of proper home hi-fi speakers due to their size constraints, progress in those areas has been truly astonishing in the last 20 years.

However glad to read the nuance has come back in your previous statements.
And at least, pure paper cones do not exist; the materials by which these cones are impregnated/coated have been also subject to improvements during the past years. Is this the scientific topic you would like to discuss ??

 

[tomtoo]

".....As far as I'm concerned active speakers can sound impressive with all kind of music but don't play anything acoustic; you can hear the instruments are transformed in an electric violin, an electric piano or an electric ........This perception is of 30 years ago and didn't change when f.e. listening to a Kii Three set nowadays.
Nothing wrong if you do not reject this effect but for me this is not high end......"


Sounds for me like the birth of new audio myth.Sry.

 

[PeterZui]

".....As far as I'm concerned active speakers can sound impressive with all kind of music but don't play anything acoustic; you can hear the instruments are transformed in an electric violin, an electric piano or an electric ........This perception is of 30 years ago and didn't change when f.e. listening to a Kii Three set nowadays.
Nothing wrong if you do not reject this effect but for me this is not high end......"


Sounds for me like the birth of new audio myth.Sry.

Sorry to admit, I don't believe in births of myths

 

[Putter]

Sorry to admit, I don't believe in births of myths

The only way to prove or disprove would be a blind test. My sense of it is that even acoustic recordings have gone through all sorts of electronics both in the recording and playback so I'm skeptical you could find a difference in a blind test.

 

[tomtoo]

There are so many ways to create active systems, it would be a wonder if they suffer all from the same problem. So until i have no scientific evidence for this wonder. For me it's a myth.

 

[cjm2077]

Radiation pattern, structural analysis of the casings, numeric simulation and optimisation of crossovers were all stuff known and used already by some companies in the late 70s, so even from that time there exist some speakers which sound even with today standards good, something you can't say for 40 year old TVs, computers, telefphones etc.

Here for a example is a 1979 AES paper about a loudspeaker I am glad to own today, with modal analysis and a flat 13" woofer which has its first breakup mode at 3 kHz!
http://jahonen.kapsi.fi/Audio/Papers/Loudspeaker with honeycomb disk diaphragm/

The biggest improvement in the last years was the optimisation of loudspeaker chassis drives with Klippel etc. especially in regards of low distortion and maximum SPL, so it could be said that a good loudspeakers of a specific dimension may not got so much better, but quite louder.

But the required processing power available has gotten so much greater in the last 40 years that much, much more complicated characteristics can be measured and simulated in much more complicated systems, and with much finer precision. Even in the 20 years I've been a working EE, I've seen the circuit simulations I've been able to model change dramatically, letting me do more complex things much quicker now than in my first jobs. You can tweak and simulate and really nail down values to go try in a real world situation, and figure out the trade-offs you need to focus on. You see how the system reacts to changes in certain parameters from all the simulations you can do.

If you look at recent studio monitor designs, they've done a lot of work to optimize the mounting of the drivers and how the surfaces blend into the front baffle in order to reduce turbulence. The edges of the boxes are also smoothly radiused instead of hard square edges. DSP sections in active speakers even allow for them to optimize the driver mounting without worrying about time alignment, because they can fix that separately. There are still plenty of ways to screw up a speaker design, but there is definitely a lot more things for them to tweak, and more trade-offs they can make to optimize a design now.

 

[thewas]

Of course there is progress in 40 years, but unfortunately Hifi started getting less popular after the 80s, so many serious innovators like the big Japanese companies lost interest in it and instead it became a popular field for "audiophool Highend". Of course there exist exceptions like the ones you stated above, but unfortunately they are not the rule.

 

[xr100]

Since when have speaker measurement devices been around?

To answer the question in the digital era, an early use of FFT-based measurement was at KEF, using Hewlett Packard analysers.

Interesting sidebar: Siegfried Linkwitz worked for HP at that time, and on his site is some correspondence with Laurie Fincham (KEF.)

Perhaps the most notable development in the world of speaker measurement was DRA Labs' MLSSA (late 80's) and certainly you'd see MLSSA plots (including the famous "waterfall" plots) on datasheets from driver manufacturers. Unfortunately, this required the installation of an expansion card in the PC used, and there was no getting around the fact that cost of the system was out of reach for most amateurs.

Lower-cost MLS loudspeaker measurement software systems were available in the 1990's. Fortunately, today's processors can do the number crunching no problemo, and software is available at no cost.

Of course, there have been many other developments to add to the arsenal of tools; for example, off-the-shelf FEA (finite element analysis) software, etc.

 

[xr100]

If you look at recent studio monitor designs, they've done a lot of work to optimize the mounting of the drivers and how the surfaces blend into the front baffle in order to reduce turbulence. The edges of the boxes are also smoothly radiused instead of hard square edges.

Not quite sure what you mean by "turbulence"? Certainly port design has been improved in this respect.

AFAIK/IIRC the radii of edges need to be VERY large indeed to really affect edge diffraction.

 

[cjm2077]

Not quite sure what you mean by "turbulence"? Certainly port design has been improved in this respect.

AFAIK/IIRC the radii of edges need to be VERY large indeed to really affect edge diffraction.

The ports have gotten better, that is certain. It's no longer just a tube they stick in a box, they're getting better shaped and some are even putting in shaped vents to create a more laminar flow. But I was more referring to what is better phrased as diffraction, which is just another wave turbulence. Maybe I didn't pick the ideal phrasing. The countersinking of drivers helps with that, as does the exact shape of the waveguide between the driver and baffle. But the ideal shape you create may place the driver origin at a different place physically than the other drivers. Now they're not time aligned, even though they have the lowest diffraction mounting. So you can now use the DSP to realign them. You might be thinking of (or talking about) the radius needed on the edges of the speaker to have ideal diffraction. That might be pretty big, and the genelec monitors certainly look pretty aggressively shaped to counter that effect. The latest PMC studio monitors mount their mid drivers and tweeters off-center for some reason and then have a piece of felt covering the other part of the face to reduce diffraction. So the big name companies (in studio monitoring at least) are certainly doing a lot of research, testing, measurement, and improvement in their products. And they're using DSP and advanced modelling to do it. You compare the products today to the same ones they sold 20-25 years ago, and they are clearly much more complicated.

 

[xr100]

The ports have gotten better, that is certain. It's no longer just a tube they stick in a box, they're getting better shaped and some are even putting in shaped vents to create a more laminar flow.

Thanks for your very good reply.

Time for bed, but here's an example of an "improved" port:
Patent - Bass reflex port and tubular body (Assignee: Yamaha Corp.)

Marketed as "Twisted Flare Port."

From the patent:

 

[PeterZui]

There are so many ways to create active systems, it would be a wonder if they suffer all from the same problem. So until i have no scientific evidence for this wonder. For me it's a myth.

Don't think there are so many ways to create an active system.
The source signal should be filtered into separated frequency bands as inputs to the amplifiers to the dedicated speakerunits. The timing accuracy of the overall signal is at stake here as we are listening to a loudspeaker with two or more separated signals out of units that are also locally separated. From an energetic point of view all time correlation that was included in the original signal is lost. Active systems might seem attractive from a mathematical point of view (Bessel, Butterworth or other filter characteristics) but I seriously believe we (or at least I) can hear this phenomenon as unnatural when listening to acoustic (and what else could be our reference ?) instruments/music.

For me how our senses work together with our brain (seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, feeling) is still a myth but:
This is the truth of our live.
Hope we all can appreciate it and enjoy the path to a better understanding of this myth.

 

[ZolaIII]

From mid 1980 things started to sunk fast regarding really good speakers. Almost all good German & Japanese films making them went down, those who didn't started making average one's. In the meantime nothing much happened at least in the real high end. The best three way switches are the same German one's from 1970's (& they still cost an arm & leg), two way deacent ones aren't problem & you can get them for 10$ a peace and general two design of midrangers (full range) driver's with paper cones are still actual the Diathone from 1950's and later FE Foster alike one. Twitters did see some advances with today's ribbon and electro statistic designs but that's not a big advancement (at least not to me) over good old silk dome onas like T90.
In 2016 Yamaha made a step up with their current three way flagship speaker the new NS 5000 based on old legendary NS series from late 1960's. With new cone material, old German switches and great; wood, tuning & craftsmen-ship but those will cost you a kidney.
https://europe.yamaha.com/en/products/contents/audio_visual/ns-5000/index.html

On do it yourself front for some 1000€ you can make a pair of two way one's with FE206En and T90's and some really nice dense wood. On the budget for less than a half of that price you can find good Chinese rip off's of Diathone designs and use those instead, you can future lower the price using plywood but I won't recommend that.
In short nothing changed much.

 

[xr100]

From mid 1980 things started to sunk fast reading really good speakers

Hmm, e.g. 1988 was when the KEF Uni-Q design was introduced, and that's been refined considerably over the years.

 

[tomtoo]

I don't know about enegetic views? Maybe you can explain? I know about the phase and there have passive speakers not to be better. No they can look much more worse.

 

[pma]

Here is my own measurement with distortion of some LSR305 mk I speakers.

At low amplitudes, distortion of good drivers is very low (Seas W18NX001 distortion measurement attached). It accelerates with amplitude/excursion, so we still need big bass drivers to get low distortion at LF. DSP may improve it (Kii3 avoiding lowest freq), but still, small driver is a small driver. It needs big excursion to move enough air at LF. No cure yet.

 

[tomtoo]

Don't think there are so many ways to create an active system.
The source signal should be filtered into separated frequency bands as inputs to the amplifiers to the dedicated speakerunits. The timing accuracy of the overall signal is at stake here as we are listening to a loudspeaker with two or more separated signals out of units that are also locally separated. From an energetic point of view all time correlation that was included in the original signal is lost. Active systems might seem attractive from a mathematical point of view (Bessel, Butterworth or other filter characteristics) but I seriously believe we (or at least I) can hear this phenomenon as unnatural when listening to acoustic (and what else could be our reference ?) instruments/music.

For me how our senses work together with our brain (seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, feeling) is still a myth but:
This is the truth of our live.
Hope we all can appreciate it and enjoy the path to a better understanding of this myth.

PeterZui said:
The source signal should be filtered into separated frequency bands as inputs to the amplifiers to the dedicated speakerunits.

............/
{

tomtoo:{You can do this analog or in the digital with a dsp}

The timing accuracy of the overall signal is at stake here as we are listening to a loudspeaker with two or more separated signals out
tomtoo:{The same we do on a passive multiway}

of units that are also locally separated.

tomtoo:{The amps are locally seperatet, but this signal goes with lightspeed. The local seperation of the Chassis is much more worse, couse this signal goes only with sonic speed}

From an energetic point of view all time

tomtoo:{dont know what the energetic view of a speaker,amp
x-over is, pls explain}

correlation that was included in the original signal is lost.

tomtoo:{This happens also on passive
multiway}

Active systems might seem attractive from a mathematical point of view (Bessel, Butterworth or other filter characteristics) but I seriously believe we

tomtoo: {i respect believes but i prefer explanations on science base}

(or at least I) can hear this phenomenon as unnatural when listening to acoustic (and what else could be our reference ?) instruments/music

tomtoo:{Some people swear they can heare a difference in networkkabels}

For me how our senses work together with our brain (seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, feeling) is still a myth but:

tomtoo:{Thats not a myth thats our subjective reality}

This is the truth of our live.
Hope we all can appreciate it and enjoy the path to a better understanding of this myth.


tomtoo:{Thats why we do science, it's all about understanding}

 

[restorer-john]

I've not seen anything to suggest that driver construction has improved too much in the last 20 years, though of course I'll be happy to be shown that I'm wrong! Woofer materials get fancier, but at the high end, people still love their paper cones.

I stretch that to 30 years. Much of the new developments being touted these days already existed in the upper range products at least 3 decades ago.

I do think the adhesives, rubbers and speaker motor tolerances have improved. Modern bass drivers are amazing and much of that was driven (pardon the pun) by the car-audio side and the extremes of temperature, linear displacement and power handling. I actually believe home audio benefited from autosound developments, whereas in the early days it was the opposite.

 

[xr100]

I stretch that to 30 years. Much of the new developments being touted these days already existed in the upper range products at least 3 decades ago.

Moving-coil drivers had largely reached "maturity" by the 1970's/1980's. It is a commodity industry with all the parts to make drivers (e.g. spiders, polyimide (Kapton) formers, etc.) available from various suppliers.

->

I do find it "amusing" to see adverts for yet another bookshelf speaker comprising 6.5" bass/mid and (separate) 1" dome tweeter, as if it could be any better than any other similar competent design. Recently, there were banner adverts on Stereophile's site for such a design, presumably carrying a disproportionately high list price, with some nonsense about "pace, rhythm and timing." (!)

Modern bass drivers are amazing and much of that was driven (pardon the pun) by the car-audio side and the extremes of temperature, linear displacement and power handling. I actually believe home audio benefited from autosound developments, whereas in the early days it was the opposite.

All thanks to crazy people trying to reach 140dB+ in "Sound Offs," eh?