HiFi Technology Flatlined Last Century

[Steven Holt]

Indeed. I thought the point of our developing robots computers were so that they could take over the jobs we didn’t want to do, not take over the jobs we want to do!

Welcome to the Law of Unintended Consequences

 

[Cbdb2]

The big shift in the last 20 years wast in hardware but in delivery. Streaming has changed the music industry, not all for the better. Better for the content users and the streaming companies. Not so much for everyone else in the business. Now for the price of one CD I can listen to almost anything I want as much as I want for over a month with out getting out of my chair, this would have been a dream when you had to go downtown to flip thru records and not find what you were looking for
The down side, less money going into artist development, so you can listen to anything but there is not as much good music to listen to. Instead of a label spending money (they no longer have) on gigs so an artist can learn to sing/play they just use autotune etc. Sorry for the off topic rant.

 

[Bruce Morgen]

Have amplifiers really advanced functionally since the 70’s? Amplifiers really hit their stride in the 1970’s. Full-bandwidth 20-20khz power at extremely low distortion became commonplace. Whether it was the modest amplifier section in a mid-priced receiver like the Kenwood KR-5400 (35 watts/ch RMS from 20-20kHz at <0.5% THD) from 1974 or the Pioneer Spec 2 power amplifier from 1976 rated at 250 watts/ch 20-20kHz at <0.1% THD, amps in the 1970’s delivered the goods.

Although your 1970s receivers and amps had already achieved the "hi-" in "hi-fi," the advent of highly refined Class D circuitry and SMPS technology launched audibly equivalent (and better measuring!) amplification into a vastly lower price bracket and vastly smaller packages. Take a look at the inflation-adjusted prices for a KR-5400 and a Spec 2 -- not to mention their enormous size and weight -- and tell me the combination of Class D and SMPS is just "based on tweaking circuits and incorporating modern components" and not a quantum leap for music loving consumers, many of whom have limited budgets -- and limited space -- for audio gear!

 

[Vacceo]

The big shift in the last 20 years wast in hardware but in delivery. Streaming has changed the music industry, not all for the better. Better for the content users and the streaming companies. Not so much for everyone else in the business. Now for the price of one CD I can listen to almost anything I want as much as I want for over a month with out getting out of my chair, this would have been a dream when you had to go downtown to flip thru records and not find what you were looking for
The down side, less money going into artist development, so you can listen to anything but there is not as much good music to listen to. Instead of a label spending money (they no longer have) on gigs so an artist can learn to sing/play they just use autotune etc. Sorry for the off topic rant.

There is, actually; but perhaps it depends on genre. The 90's had a loooot less talented Extreme Metal bands while now, you can get fantastic bands in a gazillion places that are not Scandinavia or the US.

A couple weeks ago I got a CD from Austria that would have been impossible to find over here just 15 years ago.

 

[ohnonotagain]

There's still innovation to be made out there - maybe not revolutionary, but certainly evolutionary enough to make a difference.

The Apple HomePod is not what most people would call hi-fi, but the technology in it, if applied more widely, could be transformative. To correct for room response, we need to take separate measurements and either feed them into whatever EQ software we choose to use, or use an amplifier equipped with Audyssey, Dirac Live, or something similar. Meanwhile, the HomePod is taking those measurements and adjusting to the room response in real time.

Imagine, as @cavedriver did not so long ago, if this was more widely accessible and easily applied to any listening setup by adding a couple of microphones to the room in convenient places such as on top of the speakers, and if it was as easy to use as Apple's "just works" HomePod. It wouldn't get you a perfect listening room, but it'd get you a lot closer to it without having to make any adjustments to the furniture.

 

[antcollinet]

You're completely correct here boss, but they don't sound any better.

The fact I can now easily afford a 200W+ into 8ohm amp says you're wrong.

(yes I know that 200W amp doesn't sound better than a 200W class AB.

But in the Class "amps-that-I-can**-afford", Class D sounds better.


** or: am prepared to...

 

[Sal1950]

The fact I can now easily afford a 200W+ into 8ohm amp says you're wrong.

(yes I know that 200W amp doesn't sound better than a 200W class AB.

But in the Class "amps-that-I-can**-afford", Class D sounds better.


** or: am prepared to...

Can't argue with that.

 

[mocenigo]

I disagree with the conclusion that HiFI technology has flatlined. Mostly because the premises are wrong.

Examples:

• Amplifiers: The top of Class D has been until recently second only to the very best of AB (Benchmark and Halcro) but the recent developments by Purifi and Hypex have brought it to the top. The great advantage is of course size, weight, and efficiency. I would not consider it flatlining, even though it may start now. But I would not just dismiss them with the argument "but they do not sound audibly better". This may be true, but saving energy is a critical advancement.
• Transducers: Berillium domes, new materials, the Purifi woofer surround, Bliesma tweeters. And some of this technology is also bringing costs down. You do no longer have to shell out several thousand dollars for a TOTL Fostex tweeter when Bliesma and (soon) Purifi will be able to give you the same quality for a small fraction of the price. This is also a major advancement.
• DACs: the DAC chips by various companies (Crystal, ESS, AKM) have only relatively recently solved some problems such as steady tones. And, most importantly, at price points that allow their chips to be in the hands of everyone — ten years ago you had to buy a Mola Mola Tambaqui or equivalent to get that performance. And there is some evidence that signal modulated noise floor is audible.

 

[mocenigo]

I had a computer talking in the very early 1980s.

Tsk, my wife already argues with the computer, and the computer gives up.

 

[Oddball]

The world has changed so much in every aspect that IMO the point of arguing that it did not is pretty pointless. If you went to the hi end audio shop 20 years ago with $100k they would deliver your dream system to you and kiss your feet. Try walking into a high end shop now with the same requirement. They will ask for a mortgage on your house and potentially even soul and $100k would be a down payment.

 

[Sal1950]

Amplifiers: The top of Class D has been until recently second only to the very best of AB (Benchmark and Halcro) but the recent developments by Purifi and Hypex have brought it to the top.

You are correct in your statements but the "flatline" reference is in sound quality.
With the exception of speakers, the technology for a fully transparent audio system has existed for decades now.
The below was written by Peter Aczel sometime back in the 1990s and as true today as when it was written.


"My Audio Legacy
What I have learned after six decades in audio (call it my journalistic legacy):

1. Audio is a mature technology. Its origins go back to Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison in the 1870s. By the early 1930s, at the legendary Bell Laboratories, they had thought of just about everything, including multichannel stereo. The implementation keeps improving to this day, but conceptually there is very little, perhaps nothing, really new. I have been through all phases of implementation—shellac records via crystal pickups, LPs via magnetic and moving-coil pickups, CDs, SACDs, Blu-rays, downloads, full-range and two/three/four-way mono/stereo/multichannel speakers, dynamics, electrostatics, ribbons (shall I go on?)—and heard incremental improvements most of the time, but at no point did the heavens open up and the seraphim blow their trumpets. That I could experience only in the concert hall and not very often at that. Wide-eyed reviewers who are over and over again thunderstruck by the sound of the latest magic cable or circuit tweak are delusional.

2. The principal determinants of sound quality in a recording produced in the last 60 years or so are the recording venue and the microphones, not the downstream technology. The size and acoustics of the hall, the number and placement of the microphones, the quality and level setting of the microphones will have a much greater influence on the perceived quality of the recording than how the signal was captured—whether on analog tape, digital tape, hard drive, or even direct-to-disk cutter; whether through vacuum-tube or solid-state electronics; whether with 44.1-kHz/16-bit or much higher resolution. The proof of this can be found in some of the classic recordings from the 1950s and 1960s that sound better, more real, more musical, than today’s average super-HD jobs. Lewis Layton, Richard Mohr, Wilma Cozart, Bob Fine, John Culshaw, where are you now that we need you?

3. The principal determinants of sound quality in your listening room, given the limitations of a particular recording, are the loudspeakers—not the electronics, not the cables, not anything else. This is so fundamental that I still can’t understand why it hasn’t filtered down to the lowest levels of the audio community. The melancholy truth is that a new amplifier will not change your audio life. It may, or may not, effect a very small improvement (usually not unless your old amplifier was badly designed), but the basic sound of your system will remain the same. Only a better loudspeaker can change that. My best guess as to why the loudspeaker-comes-first principle has not prevailed in the audiophile world is that a new pair of loudspeakers tends to present a problem in interior decoration. Swapping amplifiers is so much simpler, not to mention spouse-friendlier, and the initial level of anticipation is just as high, before the eventual letdown (or denial thereof).

4. Cables—that’s one subject I can’t discuss calmly. Even after all these years, I still fly into a rage when I read “$900 per foot” or “$5200 the pair.” That’s an obscenity, a despicable extortion exploiting the inability of moneyed audiophiles to deal with the laws of physics. The transmission of electrical signals through a wire is governed by resistance, inductance, and capacitance (R, L, and C). That’s all, folks! (At least that’s all at audio frequencies. At radio frequencies the geometry of the cable begins to have certain effects.) An audio signal has no idea whether it is passing through expensive or inexpensive RLC. It retains its purity or impurity regardless. There may be some expensive cables that sound “different” because they have crazy RLC characteristics that cause significant changes in frequency response. That’s what you hear, not the $900 per foot. And what about the wiring inside your loudspeakers, inside your amplifiers, inside your other components? What you don’t see doesn’t count, doesn’t have to be upgraded for megabucks? What about the miles of AC wiring from the power station to your house and inside your walls? Only the six-foot length of the thousand-dollar power cord counts? The lack of common sense in the high-end audio market drives me to despair.

5. Loudspeakers are a different story. No two of them sound exactly alike, nor will they ever. All, or at least nearly all, of the conflicting claims have some validity. The trouble is that most designers have an obsessive agenda about one particular design requirement, which they then inflate above all others, marginalizing the latter. Very few designers focus on the forest rather than the trees. The best designer is inevitably the one who has no agenda, meaning that he does not care which engineering approach works best as long as it really does. And the design process does not stop with the anechoic optimization of the speaker. Imagine a theoretically perfect loudspeaker that has an anechoic response like a point source, producing exactly the same spherical wave front at equal levels at all frequencies. If a pair of such speakers were brought into a normally reverberant room with four walls, a floor, and a ceiling, they wouldn’t sound good! They would only be a good start, requiring further engineering. It’s complicated. Loudspeakers are the only sector of audio where significant improvements are still possible and can be expected. I suspect that (1) further refinements of radiation pattern will result in the largest sonic benefits and (2) powered loudspeakers with electronic crossovers will end up being preferred to passive-crossover designs. In any case, one thing I am fairly sure of: No breakthrough in sound quality will be heard from “monkey coffins” (1970s trade lingo), i.e. rectangular boxes with forward-firing drivers. I’ll go even further: Even if the box is not rectangular but some incredibly fancy shape, even if it’s huge, even if it costs more than a luxury car, if it’s sealed or vented and the drivers are all in front, it’s a monkey coffin and will sound like a monkey coffin—boxy and, to varying degrees, not quite open and transparent.

6. Amplifiers have been quite excellent for more than a few decades, offering few opportunities for engineering breakthroughs. There are significant differences in topology, measured specifications, physical design, and cosmetics, not to mention price, but the sound of all properly designed units is basically the same. The biggest diversity is in power supplies, ranging from barely adequate to ridiculously overdesigned. That may or may not affect the sound quality, depending on the impedance characteristics and efficiency of the loudspeaker. The point is that, unless the amplifier has serious design errors or is totally mismatched to a particular speaker, the sound you will hear is the sound of the speaker, not the amplifier. As for the future, I think it belongs to highly refined class D amplifiers, such as Bang & Olufsen’s ICEpower modules and Bruno Putzeys’s modular Hypex designs, compact and efficient enough to be incorporated in powered loudspeakers. The free-standing power amplifier will slowly become history, except perhaps as an audiophile affectation. What about vacuum-tube designs? If you like second-harmonic distortion, output transformers, and low damping factors, be my guest. (Can you imagine a four-way powered loudspeaker driven by vacuum-tube modules?)

7. We should all be grateful to the founding fathers of CD at Sony and Philips for their fight some 35 years ago on behalf of 16-bit, instead of 14-bit, word depth on CDs and 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Losing that fight would have retarded digital media by several decades. As it turned out, the 16-bit/44.1-kHz standard has stood the test of time; after all these years it still sounds subjectively equal to today’s HD techniques—if executed with the utmost precision. I am not saying that 24-bit/192-kHz technology is not a good thing, since it provides considerably more options, flexibility, and ease; I am saying that a SNR of 98.08 dB and a frequency response up to 22.05 kHz, if both are actually achieved, will be audibly equal to 146.24 dB and 96 kHz, which in the real world are never achieved, in any case. The same goes for 1-bit/2.8224 MHz DSD. If your ear is so sensitive, so fine, that you can hear the difference, go ahead and prove it with an ABX test, don’t just say it.

8. The gullibility of audiophiles is what astonishes me the most, even after all these years. How is it possible, how did it ever happen, that they trust fairy-tale purveyors and mystic gurus more than reliable sources of scientific information? It wasn’t always so. Between the birth of “high fidelity,” circa 1947, and the early 1970s, what the engineers said was accepted by that generation of hi-fi enthusiasts as the truth. Then, as the ’70s decade grew older, the self-appointed experts without any scientific credentials started to crawl out of the woodwork. For a while they did not overpower the educated technologists but by the early ’80s they did, with the subjective “golden-ear” audio magazines as their chief line of communication. I remember pleading with some of the most brilliant academic and industrial brains in audio to fight against all the nonsense, to speak up loudly and brutally before the untutored drivel gets out of control, but they just laughed, dismissing the “flat-earthers” and “cultists” with a wave of the hand. Now look at them! Talk to the know-it-all young salesman in the high-end audio salon, read the catalogs of Audio Advisor, Music Direct, or any other high-end merchant, read any of the golden-ear audio magazines, check out the subjective audio websites—and weep. The witch doctors have taken over. Even so, all is not lost. You can still read Floyd Toole and Siegfried Linkwitz on loudspeakers, Douglas Self and Bob Cordell on amplifiers, David Rich (hometheaterhifi.com) on miscellaneous audio subjects, and a few others in that very sparsely populated club. (I am not including The Audio Critic, now that it has become almost silent.) Once you have breathed that atmosphere, you will have a pretty good idea what advice to ignore.

—Peter Aczel"

 

[Barrelhouse Solly]

It hit me about 20 years ago that speaker design had reached a plateau in the '50s or '60s. There were improvements in materials but no radical changes in design.

 

[Justdafactsmaam]

You are correct in your statements but the "flatline" reference is in sound quality.
With the exception of speakers, the technology for a fully transparent audio system has existed for decades now.

I disagree. The technology I am using has not existed for decades and has lead to night and day improvements. Improvements that simply were not in existence decades ago. Current state of the art DSP and the processing power needed implement it did not exist decades ago.

“Sound quality” definitely did not flatline decades ago.

We did not have the technology for a fully transparent audio chain from concert hall experience to home listening decades ago. We can come really close now.

That’s pretty much the opposite of flat lining

The below was written by Peter Aczel sometime back in the 1990s and as true today as when it was written.


1. Audio is a mature technology. Its origins go back to Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison in the 1870s. By the early 1930s, at the legendary Bell Laboratories, they had thought of just about everything, including multichannel stereo. The implementation keeps improving to this day, but conceptually there is very little, perhaps nothing, really new.

:::cough::: DSP

 

[Timcognito]

There were improvements in materials but no radical changes in design.

Yes but Neodymium/Ferrite/Cobalt magnets led to huge gains in performance and lower weight. Pneumatic tires were invented the late 1800s and were made of canvas.

 

[ohnonotagain]

I disagree. The technology I am using has not existed for decades and has lead to night and day improvements. Improvements that simply were not in existence decades ago. Current state of the art DSP and the processing power needed implement it did not exist decades ago.

You're both right. The technology for a fully transparent audio system has existed for decades; DSP addresses the problem that nobody has a fully transparent room.

 

[terryforsythe]

I disagree with the title of this thread. I'm reiterating what others have stated, but here are my list of technological improvements and my opinion on this subject.

My list of technological improvements:

1. DSP

2. Room correction

3. Class D amplifiers

4. Audio measurement and speaker design tools, especially software

5. Speaker drivers - e.g., KEF's concentric drivers and Purifi's woofers

6. DACs

7. Music recordings

My opinion:

The first over-riding issue I see is that truly high performing audio systems can be implemented at costs most people (at least in western nations) can afford. In the latter part of the 20th century, a consumer could put together a good sounding system at reasonable cost, but not a system with the level of performance they can implement today for the same cost (corrected for inflation). Although there were some amplifiers and pre-amplifiers that were very good and budget friendly, generally speaking, affordable DACs and speakers were not as good as they are today. Also, I do not recall good affordable DSP and room correction software being widely available to consumers in the 20th century. In my opinion, DSP and room correction have significantly contributed to achieving budget friendly high performance sound quality.

The second issue I see is that, on average, music recordings today are much better. There certainly were some gems from the 80s and 90s. For example, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms CD was recorded and mastered very well, even by today's standards. But, there were a lot of recordings that were not very good. Today, due to technological innovation, even garage bands can obtain good recordings using fairly inexpensive software they can run on their PC or Mac.

I agree with the following statement in the posted article:

I suspect that (1) further refinements of radiation pattern will result in the largest sonic benefits and (2) powered loudspeakers with electronic crossovers will end up being preferred to passive-crossover designs.

I partially disagree with the following statement in the posted article:

In any case, one thing I am fairly sure of: No breakthrough in sound quality will be heard from “monkey coffins” (1970s trade lingo), i.e. rectangular boxes with forward-firing drivers. I’ll go even further: Even if the box is not rectangular but some incredibly fancy shape, even if it’s huge, even if it costs more than a luxury car, if it’s sealed or vented and the drivers are all in front, it’s a monkey coffin and will sound like a monkey coffin—boxy and, to varying degrees, not quite open and transparent.

I have KEF LS60s and heavily modified Elac Uni-Fi reference bookshelf speakers (now all active), and they definitely are very open and transparent. (I was pleasantly surprised with how much improvement I obtained from the modifications I made to my Elacs).

However, I still would not put them on par with some of the extremely high end open baffle speakers I heard in the late 80s or early 90s, e.g., Infinity Reference Standard and Infinity IRS Beta (I'm digging from very old memories, so there probably is some bias/memory distortion on my part). But, those speakers were so expensive that they were fantasy products unobtainable to most consumers at that time.

 

[Duke]

[quoting Peter Aczel from sometime back in the 1990s] "I suspect that (1) further refinements of radiation pattern will result in the largest sonic benefits... No breakthrough in sound quality will be heard from “monkey coffins” (1970s trade lingo), i.e. rectangular boxes with forward-firing drivers. I’ll go even further: Even if the box is not rectangular but some incredibly fancy shape, even if it’s huge, even if it costs more than a luxury car, if it’s sealed or vented and the drivers are all in front, it’s a monkey coffin and will sound like a monkey coffin—boxy and, to varying degrees, not quite open and transparent."

Being among the outliers who likes to put drivers on the back of the box in a bid for "further refinements of radiation pattern", you caught my attention. Peter, if you read this, thanks for the encouragement!

(Not claiming such "refinement of radiation pattern" qualifies as a breakthrough, but perhaps an incremental improvement.)

Anyway thank you Sal for posting this! Do you happen to know what kind(s) of speakers Peter preferred?

 

[ahofer]

When I listen to my 78" 1998 VMPS SuperTower III speakers and compare them against the 46" Revel F228Be speakers the difference in sound is notable. You can argue basic speaker technology is similar but today's top of the line drivers are considerably more advanced and the science behind selecting which drivers, components and crossovers are paired together in the optimal enclosure has improved signingficantly. Twenty-five years later recognizable improvement in State of the Art sound reproduction is obvious. It's a totally different class of speaker. That counts as innovation in my book.

View attachment 372324 View attachment 372325

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Given the aging effects, it is very difficult to do these comparisons well, but that's definitely my impression as well. I own 228be speakers, and it seems, subjectively, like they are at least as good as the old Duntech Sovereigns I yearned for in the early 1980s.

 

[Justdafactsmaam]

You're both right. The technology for a fully transparent audio system has existed for decades; DSP addresses the problem that nobody has a fully transparent room.

I assert that the room is part of the system.

A truly transparent audio system would be recording and playback that is indistinguishable from a live performance.

What recording and playback system from the 20th century even came close to doing that?

 

[antcollinet]

I assert that the room is part of the system.

A truly transparent audio system would be recording and playback that is indistinguishable from a live performance.

What recording and playback system from the 20th century even came close to doing that?

Correct, that would be a transparent recording AND playback system. Since there is no recording system that is transparent to a live performance, that cannot exist.

What we strive for here is transparency in the reproduction equipment - which means transparency to what is captured in the recording - not to a live performance.