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.