Really I think the problem is that the budget gear is so good at this point... that all but a very, very select few don't see any reason to want more. Back when a "cheap stereo" meant a boom-box, or a Realistic "rack" system and some horribly innacturate speakers that were mostly plastic - there was tons of room for improvement (and a sense of longing for decent sound). Now that a setup in the $100-500 range can give you ~80% of what was once limited to a dream hifi system... it's more than good enough for most. When I first listened to my JBL 305's that was what shocked me the most... that a $200 DAC and a $225 pair of monitors could sound so much better than almost everything I'd listened to in the previous 30 years.
After
the 70's, it wasn't a problem to create
"solid state" electronics that
performed well, and in the speaker world, too, there had been various developments, including the Thiele-Small model, "new" materials and, presumably, advancements in manufacturing (injection moulding is one that I can think of?) By the 1990s high-performance delta-sigma DACs were available (Sony, for example.)
You could get very much better performance than a
"MIDI" or "MINI"
system a few decades ago for the
same price or not that much more. The majority didn't bother! If you did your "homework" to find products that were solidly engineered, then the "law of diminishing returns" would hit hard very quickly. If you spent more and didn't do your "homework," then you'd potentially end up with
junk no matter how much money was involved.
So it would seem to me to be a
continuation of the same
trend...
And now, we have all the DSP you could ever dream of to throw at loudspeaker management. Happy days.
To quote from
Douglas Self: (Article from some years back...)
"In recent reviews it was easy to find a £795 preamplifier (Counterpoint SA7) that boasted a feeble 12dB disc overload margin, (another preamp costing £2040 struggled up to 15dB (Burmester 838/846) and another, costing
£1550 that could only manage a
1kHz distortion performance of 1%; a lack of linearity that would have caused consternation ten years ago (Quicksilver). However, by paying
£5700 one could inch this down to
0.3% (Audio Research M100-2 monoblocs). This does not mean it is impossible to buy an 'audiophile' amplifier that measures well; another example would be the preamplifier/power amplifier combination that provides a very respectable disc overload margin of 31 dB and 1 kHz rated-power
distortion below 0.003%; the total cost being
£725 (Audiolab 8000C/8000P). I believe this to be a representative sample, and we appear to be in the paradoxical situation that the most expensive equipment provides the worst objective performance. Whatever the rights and wrongs of subjective assessment, I think that most people would agree that this is a strange state of affairs. Finally, it is surely a morally ambiguous position to persuade non-technical people that to get a really good sound they have to buy £2000 preamps and so on, when both technical orthodoxy and common sense indicate that this is quite unnecessary."
I want to believe Creative has a new fantastic product... but there's just too many decades of disappointment keeping me from believing anything they say.
Creative Labs. are a strange company. Particularly when they were the "de facto" standard in consumer/gaming sound cards, they had very large considerable and economies of scale.
R&D wise, they acquired E-mu (and thus
Dave Rossum et al.) For example, the E-mu 8000 chip was developed for the AWE-32 soundcard (1994.) Its feature set was basic compared to E-mu's high-end samplers, but it did include E-mu's patented 8-point interpolation (much better aliasing performance when pitch-shifting) and the original iteration of the card had 2xSIMM slots supporting up to 32Mb of RAM for loading samples. That capability would have required astonishingly expensive equipment only a few years earlier, and represented
tremendous bang-for-the-buck. (There was also a SPDIF header on the card, straight from the E-mu 8000, so you could avoid Creative's dodgy analogue stages...)
Unfortunately, the
full potential of their resources usually didn't manifest in their products.
E-mu branded sound cards were one notable exception, high performance and value, although that's all gone now.
Creative have always been very, erm, "creative" with their marketing. They are still doing interesting things but with the soundbar you mention, like yourself, I'll believe it when I hear it...
