HiFi Technology Flatlined Last Century

[Chrispy]

They all full of BS.

Any more than some of our members who will discard an amp or dac with a lowly sinad of 80 so that they can get the better sounding sinad of 100?

 

[Anton D]

How can this be? The reviewers keep telling us even wires are improved model over model over model! Amps every year are even better sounding model over model over model. Will wonders ever cease?

It's because we don't yet understand the science they keep uncovering. Right?

 

[Sal1950]

Any more than some of our members who will discard an amp or dac with a lowly sinad of 80 so that they can get the better sounding sinad of 100?

That's just as foolish.
Though I will say that 80 is probably right on the line of what is actually audible.

 

[jayapple]

That's what it looks like on the surface, but that's a layman's view. Ordinary people who used to use film tapes or CD now don't need physical media to record sound. But it's a big step forward.

Speaking of hardware, speakers may not have progressed much over the years, but the devices that record and play sound have changed qualitatively. Especially in the digital age, a few inches of gadgets can store thousands of songs and play them anytime, anywhere，dozens of hours. In the old days you'd have to drive around with a box of CD to listen to that many songs.

Decoding chip changes and digital music is the HIFI civilianization, a few hundred dollars of products may not be much of a difference with tens of thousands of dollars, modern chips are highly integrated and multi-tasking, and affordable.

AMP may have a big price gap now, but as Class D chip technology continues to improve, it will also get cheaper and cheaper, which is what we want to see, cheap and high performance.

The speaker can be said to have no progress, and the price gap is very large, this is a conservative industry, does not allow the emergence of new technology, so I think consumer is enough, because high-end also has no technology, is to change a nice name.

In summary, the digital age has brought great changes.

 

[Pretorious]

So ... EchoDot and Apple Homepod ?

Yes, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That prejudice is exactly what annoys me about audiophiles. This is how a vast number of people listen to music these days. The engineering and design are clearly towards a good universal sound, and follows good audio practices. Should not that be welcome as high fidelity? It’s another aspect of it, certainly; it doesn’t replace higher end or much more expensive, complex, or physically larger gear.

 

[Zapper]

It's not true that speakers aren't advancing. Like Rip Van Winkle, I went to sleep as far as audio was concerned for over 20 years. And like Rip, I was amazed by the changes when I woke up. I remember nothing like the Neumann KH 150 from the 1990's - with ruler flat response, good dispersion control, amazing bass with very low distortion, DSP room correction, and a powerful amp, all out of a 6.5" 2-way at a reasonable price. And passives like the KEFs and the Ascends are almost as impressive.

Engineering advances are as much in the perfection of the details as they are in the architecture. It's silly to call a 1939 aircraft engine the peak of IC development - that engine was eclipsed by the Merlin engines powering many thousands of P51's over Germany only 5 years later. Likewise it's silly to call a 1970's amp or speaker the peak of their respective classes. Much progress has been made since, even if it's more evident to the audio analyzer than our ears.

 

[EERecordist]

HiFi as it stands has developed very little in the last few decades. The stand-out development has been in digital technology but as far as reproduction equipment is concerned, name me one big development. Let's explore this assertion.

Agree. Here are some additions and a few predictions.

1. The consumer side can afford obsolescence for low price items. Young people are competitive in adopting technology. They have to show off to their peers.

The Walkman changed many things. Music with earbuds became a lifestyle. It is the dominant form of music consumption today. The boom box had a short but influential impact on music lifestyles. They did not have to have fidelity.

MP3 from Fraunhofer changed things by compression when memory and transmission bandwidth were scarce. Most people consume compressed music. Even in the analog days, vinyl and broadcast audio was compressed!

The Walkman concept resulted in a huge MP3 player market. Apple built it into an ecosystem with music library management, primitive to start. Then it merged into mobile phones.

Portable music through earbuds has changed preferences. https://shc.stanford.edu/stanford-h...-generation-prefers-mp3-fidelity-study-says-0.

The history of DJing and the DJ mixer had a large impact. Live music playback has always reduced costs, from a symphony, to a quartet, to a single DJ who can play before a large audience in the tens of thousands, almost always paying nothing for the music rights. A DJ has to have a vast, ever-evolving music library, as cheap as possible. Instead of vinyl which is heavy, the Pioneer CDJ allowed licensed and burned CD's to be manipulated on the player platter. For those who wanted to keep their turntables, Serato DJ used digitally encoded disks on turntables to manipulate tracks on a laptop hard drive in software. Native Instruments with Traktor eliminated the turntable and used a control surface.

It is wild to see hardware analog synths, like Moog, Arp, and Buchla of the 60s, back, like the Eurorack format, including hybrid analog digital systems.

A big advancement was the music genome project and Hit Science. Those analyzed music in the digital domain. The same technique was then applied to YouTube to save them from music rights lawsuits.

A friend of mine travels in Africa collecting pop and traditional fusion music. There people collect and trade music on mobile feature phones - similar to flip phones before smartphones. He brings them back and presses them into vinyl on his own label Sahel Sounds.

On the consumer side compared to the golden days, noise and distortion are lower, and prices are lower for similar use cases.


2. The professional side can afford obsolescence, it competes to have the newest equipment, and if technology can save labor, it's justified. They have the budget.

Mix automation was a massive change.

It took some time to get the anti-aliasing filters right.

Then we got ProTools. Now analog gear is modeled in software very inexpensively. It is expensive to maintain multitrack hardware.

Avid has also pushed all digital live sound mixing. Now that is supported by networked audio like Dante. Digico a dominant live sound mix system. It is digital from the analog microphone and it feeds into digital processors and power amps.

Large concert halls and classical recording are moving to networked audio such as the Millennia preamps into a digital mixer recorder.

Digital signal processing is cheap and available through mass produced chips by Analog Devices and Texas Instruments with developer libraries.

From the earliest disk-cutting compressors and equalizers we now have many more compression concepts in software and tools like Fab Filter which combine EQ and compression. There are also spatializing software and mid-side processing in the mix and in mastering such as the K-Stereo Ambience plugin.

Microphones haven't changed much, but some now have impressively low self noise.

There have been attempts at digital microphones by Neumann. Schoeps has been very successful with the Super CMIT, but that is for voice recording actors. The Schoeps CMD 42 over AES42 is part of their Collette capsule ecosystem. So that is about to grow.

Dolby has the money to try to force the world with Apple to spatial audio and there is a competing system from Sony/Google. The game is software licensing for every TV, earphone, AVR, movie theater, etc. Like DolbyVision, not every TV maker has licensed it on every model.

The big new thing is synthetic music scoring systems. They were preceded by ACID Pro for dance music. They are a great tool for the last holdout of expensive production, live orchestral film scoring. In my view the leader is Spitfire. They recorded live orchestral players and sections. With the system you can write a score on a timeline and the software will perform it. A good orchestra is better, but it is much more expensive.

What is coming is AI/machine learning in automatic composition. "Compose the track for a scene that is like ___"

John La Grou Imersiv will have an impact on the consumer-side and for professionals.

 

[JiiPee]

My prediction is that analogue electronics has already reached its peak when it comes to audible performance of HiFi equipment. Ditto for A/D and D/A converters. There may be room for improvements in price/performance relationship, user friendliness etc..., but any performance improvements, while they may be measurable, will not be audible.

In digital domain, I can still see potential improvements especially in digital signal processing and its usage in compensating challenges in transducers and listening space acoustics.

The greatest potential for audible improvements is imho in transducers. I would not be surprised, if in not too distant future some radically new concepts would emerge to replace current speaker and/or headphones technology. How about having means to bypass our ears and stimulate our brains directly in a way that makes us experience the result as music. That way we could for example maybe increase the frequency range our brains would detect as music and consequently open a whole new kind of artistic opportunities.

 

[Sal1950]

Agree. Here are some additions and a few predictions.

That's one hell of a signature.
Instead, Might I suggest you build a intro in the members area with photos and all ?
See my link below.

 

[Pareto Pragmatic]

Ok, so I guess there is no audible difference between things on the market today and in 2000? That's what a flat line would mean.

That seems wrong on the face of it.

I will agree that the biggest leaps, developments, new tech, that happened in the 20th century. I'll even say in the second half of that century. Audio is now a mature technology, and that means we see refinements and not leaps forward.

Class D design is completely and radically different than class AB. The switching power supplies that power it are also the same with respect to linear power supplies. The two combined bring high efficiency, small size and ability to produce a ton of power. And with advent of SMD and better power transistors, combined with proper feedback design, is able to produce an incredibly unique offering than that of the past. It is not at all a refinement.

I'm no expert, that's for sure.

The first class D design for sale was a kit in the 1960s. SMPS came around in the 70s. More or less, according to google. And the first patent for a negative feedback amplifier was in the 1920s.

Seems like a last century development to me. And recent improvements strike me as a refinement of the original ideas, getting them more and more "right".

OTOH, if I take price and availability into account for a given level of audio performance, I do think class d/smps/better feedback design is a HUGE advancement in terms of who can access the highest levels of performance. It is a refinement of tech, but a huge leap forward for audiophile consumers.

 

[Zapper]

Seems like a last century development to me. And recent improvements strike me as a refinement of the original ideas, getting them more and more "right".

That's true for all science and technology. The underlying issue is that there have been few fundamental advances in physics and chemistry since the early 20th century. Classical mechanics and electromagnetism were complete in the 19th century, and led to the development of most of the big ideas in technology. Quantum mechanics was developed in the early 20th century, and led to solid-state electronics, modern chemistry, and materials science. Mathematical concepts such as information theory and computer science followed a similar timeline. Together, these led to most of the rest of the big ideas in the 20th century.

You are correct that most of the recent technological developments have 20th century antecedents. Things like active speakers with Class-D amps and DSP would have been understandable in concept in the 1970's, but entirely impractical. They have come to commercial fruition through millions of small advances, one step at a time, rather than any huge conceptual leap. Engineering today is mostly about refining the implementation of these ideas, and assembling them in systems of increasing complexity.

 

[restorer-john]

Things like active speakers with Class-D amps and DSP would have been understandable in concept in the 1970's, but entirely impractical.

Bullshit.

Active speakers were around and sold in the 1970s and sold by several companies including Philips, who also incorporate motional feedback into their (MFB) active lodspeakers in 1975, as were Class D amplifiers (Sony 1978) and "DSP" existed at the dawn of Compact Disc and was commercialised and sold into mainstream HiFi gear in the mid 1980s.

Don't make stuff up and don't attempt to re-imagine history. It's tiresome.

 

[Pareto Pragmatic]

That's true for all science and technology. The underlying issue is that there have been few fundamental advances in physics and chemistry since the early 20th century.

True. However, you see the same thing with bicycles, where such fundamental science is not so important. Most "new" ideas were patented a hundred+ years ago. We are clever creatures.

What makes those ideas work well for bicycles today is the materials we have to work with. Composites, different alloys, etc.

 

[Sal1950]

What makes those ideas work well for bicycles today is the materials we have to work with. Composites, different alloys, etc.

And Internal Combustion Engines.

 

[Pareto Pragmatic]

And Internal Combustion Engines.

Thanks for the chuckle.

1939, bolt on 4 stroke for a bicycle was sold. More seriously, battery tech has led to a huge boom in e-bikes this century.

Cheaters, every single one of them!

 

[ahofer]

I could quibble on a few small details but I think you mostly hit the nail on the head.
I wish the truth wasn't so, if only we had something to look forward to equal to the digital revolution of the 1980s.


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

Innovation can come in efficiency (cost, energy, whatever) as well as final quality, though.

 

[Sal1950]

Innovation can come in efficiency (cost, energy, whatever) as well as final quality, though.

Very true bro, in a few years we'll have 24 channels of 1kw amps and preamps & AVP in a thumbnail sized package.
But if we haven't made any progress in Hi Fi reproduction, what has been gained.
I've spent 50+ years striving for better sounding music and would hate to believe there's no where left to go.
Just my personal feelings.

 

[Zapper]

Bullshit.

Active speakers were around and sold in the 1970s and sold by several companies including Philips, who also incorporate motional feedback into their (MFB) active lodspeakers in 1975, as were Class D amplifiers (Sony 1978) and "DSP" existed at the dawn of Compact Disc and was commercialised and sold into mainstream HiFi gear in the mid 1980s.

Don't make stuff up and don't attempt to re-imagine history. It's tiresome.

I said "active speakers with Class-D amps and DSP". "And" means both are true. Show me an active speaker from the 1970's with both Class-D and DSP. Such a thing may have existed - my knowledge of 1970's audio is not encyclopedic - but I don't remember one.

Your argument is one of antecedants - there were Class-D amps, DSP, active speakers, room correction, etc, before 1990's. My point is integration - a Neumann KH 150 combines all these technologies, at a much higher level of development and a greatly lower cost, than would have been possible 25 years ago.

 

[Anton D]

The future of Hi Fi is so bright, it oughta wear shades.

We will know its job is done when we no longer need to think about the audio playback chain: invisible, lossless, reconstructive...it will be the first part of the holodeck that becomes truly illusory.

 

[levimax]

The future of Hi Fi is so bright, it oughta wear shades.

We will know its job is done when we no longer need to think about the audio playback chain: invisible, lossless, reconstructive...it will be the first part of the holodeck that becomes truly illusory.

That sounds about right but I wonder if listening to recorded music will be any more "fun" / "entertaining" in the future than it is now or than it has been in the past. I have a fancy new OLED TV and the video quality of some of the new shows on Netfilx is amazing but sometimes the content isn't for me (I get roped into watching "Love is Blind" and the like). On the other hand I can be happily entertained watching a good black and white TV show or movie.