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How much have speakers improved over the past decades?

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.

It's instructive to model excursion vs. frequency for different SPL's. It soon becomes clear that a 6.5" driver alone requires "help" if it's going to stay under Xmax unless you stick to rather modest peak levels.
 
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.

"Paper" cones are highly engineered, a mix of pulp, selected types of wood fibre and other "stuff," and can be reinforced (e.g. Kevlar) and coated. Whether better/worse than other cone materials is another matter, but they aren't low tech...
 
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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".

And then there was this from 1988:

THE ANCIENT AUDIOPHILE'S QUEST FOR THE ULTIMATE HOME SYSTEM

(Authored by Drew Daniels of JBL.)

To quote, specification as follows:

[4] 2245H 18" subwoofer drivers
[2] 2220H 15" midbass drivers
[2] 2123H 10" midrange drivers
[2] 2445J 4" compression drivers
[2] 2382 Flat-Front Bi-Radial horns
[2] 2405 Diffraction tweeters
[1] 6290 power amplifier
[4] 6260 power amplifiers
[2] 6230 power amplifiers
[2] 525 active crossovers
[2] 3105 passive crossovers


That ought to have blown the cobwebs off "audiophool" systems. ;-)
 
There are a couple of points I would like to state that sometimes, while quite relevant, do not get mentioned in these kind of discussions;

1. Power of marketing. Like with any other consumer products loudspeakers sales tend to be market focused. The market is of course segmented to better cater to different sectors, be it PA, studio, home audio, hifi or what ever you call it. How does this impact loudspeaker design? Think about it, the aim of a multinational conglomerate is not necessarily that of creating the best performing product. It is to make money. The decisions the consumer makes can be influenced by many factors, the most obvious of which is marketing. What this means is that performance is simply not something directly translatable to price, as there are various other factors affecting the needs of and means of the consumer. Loudspeakers are not a commodity (well, you could argue that some types might be - but i digress).

Why is this important? Well, DIY loudspeakers are a good example. The price gap between very high performing loudspeakers manufactured by the bigger players and those you can build yourself is steadily increasing. You could build a pair of floor-to-ceiling line arrays with minimal cost (a few hundred dollars) - getting comparable performance to a "statement" product from a respected manufacturer. The same with sub woofers and other products. The most active segments do not display this tendency, such as small, inexpensive monitors. This leads to my second point.

2. Information and data. While general consumers might not be all that interested in the workings-off or the science behind loudspeakers, all the relevant information and data as freely available today. There are few, if any, secrets in loudspeaker designs and manufacturing. When speaking about performance we can generalize and say that it is more likely that an individual looking for the best performing loudspeaker would be inclined to learn about what makes the clock tick. As is with many other products (cars, computers, food, etc.), those consumers who are mostly interested in the best performing product will be somewhat immune to many of the marketing-influences. It has been very interesting to notice this over the past decade or so regarding high-end audio.

There has been quite a paradigm shift the last couple of decades. People are more aware of what makes a good loudspeaker sound good and what does not. People are able to reproduce measurements (at least some of them) and see through the jargon used to describe speakers. How does this affect loudspeaker performance? Those manufacturers who target people in the know-how will have to target measurable performance in order to get sales. If this consumer-group increases in size, more manufacturers will have to produce better performing products. We have seen quite a few companies pop up in the last couple of decades who aim at the skeptical audiophile. Some have succeeded, others have not.

3. Brand loyalty. While brand loyalty is still very much a thing, I would argue that this is less so the case in high-end audio these days than it was in the past. Because of both points number 1. and 2. consumers are more wary of their favorite manufacturer. Many of us have experienced lack of consistency in regards to the performance of products from various companies in various markets in our lifetime. There are political, economical and psychological reasons for why this is increasingly common, but that discussion is not very interesting. Take for example IBM v. Lenovo, Avast v. Avast, Firestone, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple.

While fanobyism is still alive and well, fortunately there is still more competition in the audio-space than in many other markets. Take into account the instant and constant methods of communication consumers possess today. A lackluster product can be quite hurtful today, while quietly fading away in the past (or becoming a trend initself as the case is with Bose for instance). How does this affect loudspeaker performance? There is more an intensive today to produce consistently well performing products than it was a few decades back.

These are just some of the things I have found to influence loudspeakers today versus yesteryear. I am not talking about all the technological breakthroughs that have been made during the last 5-6 decades (some of which take dozens of years to reach the market) - as other people have already mentioned that, but I would like to note that the processing power of general purpose computers is very much underestimated by many audiophiles. I had someone ask me the other day, quite snarky: "How can you correct for all the different issues every small part of a second, each and every frequency, for two channels with a 120dB headroom?" I was stunned by this question. I am by no means an expert in real time audio processing, I dabble, but I answered pretty much before thinking; "Do you know what a gigahertz is?"

Can you buy a better loudspeaker today than you could 50 years ago? Yes. 20 years ago? Yes.
Are all the products within a certain price range today better than all the products within the same price range (adjusted) than 50 years ago? Most likely. 20 years ago? Probably not.

To answer the question more directly: Speakers have generally improved quite a bit, depending on the criteria of course. I would say the biggest improvements are to be found within the DIY scene, as the goals there are usually more inline with the subject of this question; improving performance.
 
1. Power of marketing. Like with any other consumer products loudspeakers sales tend to be market focused. The market is of course segmented to better cater to different sectors, be it PA, studio, home audio, hifi or what ever you call it. How does this impact loudspeaker design?

Form factor, cost, finish, product characteristics adjusted for target application. For example, high efficiency and power handling for "PA" applications rather than necessarily refinement and sub-bass extension.

Highly "value engineered" junk with "2000W PMPO" and "ULTRA BASS" plastered on the front for the uninformed general consumer market, or whatever the equivalent is today.

Think about it, the aim of a multinational conglomerate is not necessarily that of creating the best performing product.

TAD drivers? ;-)

Loudspeakers are not a commodity

Mostly they are.

A good example these days is a Chinese company that has acquired a certain European driver manufacturer... their homepage lists the following categories: consumer audio, professional audio, connected devices, automotive OEM, headphones, drivers and acoustic modules.

In my 1994 Audax (French company that was then part of Harman International, now basically defunct) catalogue includes "product series" for "industrial" applications (TVs, etc.), "professional" (PA, etc.) to lower cost and higher cost "hi-fi" speaker lines. The higher cost "hi-fi" speaker lines used the same (cast) baskets for all products, different cone materials were available (from paper to "aerogel") and drivers optimised for different applications (bass/mid, midrange, etc.) Of course, driver manufacturers will supply custom versions of product, for large enough orders.

And to really show that it is a "commodity" industry, one can go up the "supply chain" and find companies that sell the parts, e.g. voice coil formers, spiders, magnets, etc., used in driver manufacture.

It is also easy to see how the product line strategy and parts/technology sharing is used by speaker manufacturers, too.

Well, DIY loudspeakers are a good example. The price gap between very high performing loudspeakers manufactured by the bigger players and those you can build yourself is steadily increasing.

Not sure about that, there are high quality finished products available with non-silly price tags?

OTOH, absurdly priced "Wilson Audio"-type products have been around for quite a few years, too. ;-)

A major benefit of "DIY" is that the design doesn't have to conform to that which is marketable and shippable. As an extreme example, if you really want to form the cabinet out of concrete, then you can. ;-) (But moreover various system designs and use of DSP, etc.)
 
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but still, small driver is a small driver. It needs big excursion to move enough air at LF. No cure yet.
I'll always remember a visit to the DIY speaker store and just listening to different kind of speakers comparing some internet design (can't remember) with a Vifa Basis 95 with two 10 inch woofers and the effortlessness it played at louder volumes, could not hear the shop owner when realizing it was a bit loud.
 
In the 90s, I had a car audio system that could achieve 141 dB, and all it consisted of was a 150 watt per channel MTX amplifier and two entry-level $99 JBL 15" subwoofers from Crutchfield. Back then, JBL's crown jewel was the GTi series subwoofers.

People are reaching 180 dB now, and that is crazy. It's impressive to see drivers reaching and exceeding 90mm of excursion but the laws of physics still apply. Subwoofers are getting smaller and smaller but the power they need has increased exponentially. It's interesting that speakers haven't become more efficient. I guess power is relatively inexpensive nowadays.

I have a set of Infinity Composition Prelude P-FRs introduced in 1994 that could make a good case for speakers not advancing much in the last 25 years.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/infinity-composition-prelude-p-fr-loudspeaker

People here are claiming it would take $40,000 to get that kind of performance today (today meaning 2014), lol.

https://forums.audioholics.com/foru...nt-for-infinity-p-fr-and-p-cc-speakers.89976/



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

What does Revel do, and when were they founded?
 
Another idea - post noteworthy speakers, what they changed, and when introduced.

AR - acoustic suspension allows smaller speakers
Advent - about 1970? (I'm not sure what they did better than the ARs...)

Rogers mini-monitors...
 
I think computer modelling of magnetic circuit linearity has improved drivers at a given cost.
More drivers are pistonic in their whole useable bandwidth, "useable" that is as long as the crossover can attenuate the severe out of band breakup, though most are still a question of using them in their resonant region for quite a lot of their passband and having some damping to smooth the response, or deliberately modal like the BMR or NXT type drivers which were made feasible by computer modelling.
 
These speakers cost about 600 euro a piece to build and could be bought pre-build for 1000 a piece or something. If I would spend the same money today, how much better would it be? Have people gotten better at crossovers? Has distortion been lowered? Higher SPL? Better design due to better measurements?
It's really difficult to tell.
There are few different points about this.
1) you need to adjust inflation rate which is generally low, but still officially almost 40% in 20 years
2) low-end passive mass market became much better due to numerical modelling, curved moulding faceplates (not available for DIY) and some advances in mass-market drivers (i.e. stamped ribs in aluminium drivers like 50 euro low distortion midwoofer in this project http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/SBAcoustics-61-NAC.htm )
3) high-end passive also advanced a little bit due to cost-no-option drivers and custom materials like used in Rockport and Magico
4) all actives advanced a lot due to all mentioned before and cheap computing power
5) regarding your exact question - it's tough to say "how much better" without carifying "what is better exactly for you" and your use-case.
For sure, if you use state-of-the-art components, current design might be very nice even in 1000 euro niche. It can be allover better than old one, but I don't know how much difference you'll need to admit that current design is better. Ok, maybe 2-ways of the same size will start to scream little later and will sound more balanced in same untreated room with additional 3-5 Hz low of F3. That might be not useful for you at all if you need ultimate dry and speedy bass and clarity at 65 db spl - for example.
6) anyway, there's no breackthroughs denying laws of physics like good efficient passive sealed designs or passive linear phase 4st order crossovers, etc.
7) good motors still cost a lot and even more than before - rare earth magnets are very expensive and even copper price is growing
 
It's really difficult to tell.
There are few different points about this.
1) you need to adjust inflation rate which is generally low, but still officially almost 40% in 20 years
2) low-end passive mass market became much better due to numerical modelling, curved moulding faceplates (not available for DIY) and some advances in mass-market drivers (i.e. stamped ribs in aluminium drivers like 50 euro low distortion midwoofer in this project http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/SBAcoustics-61-NAC.htm )
3) high-end passive also advanced a little bit due to cost-no-option drivers and custom materials like used in Rockport and Magico
4) all actives advanced a lot due to all mentioned before and cheap computing power
5) regarding your exact question - it's tough to say "how much better" without carifying "what is better exactly for you" and your use-case.
For sure, if you use state-of-the-art components, current design might be very nice even in 1000 euro niche. It can be allover better than old one, but I don't know how much difference you'll need to admit that current design is better. Ok, maybe 2-ways of the same size will start to scream little later and will sound more balanced in same untreated room with additional 3-5 Hz low of F3. That might be not useful for you at all if you need ultimate dry and speedy bass and clarity at 65 db spl - for example.
6) anyway, there's no breackthroughs denying laws of physics like good efficient passive sealed designs or passive linear phase 4st order crossovers, etc.
7) good motors still cost a lot and even more than before - rare earth magnets are very expensive and even copper price is growing
I got M106's a couple of months after my original post. Their general sound signature was pretty close, maybe because the other speaker I had to chance to compare them to was the PMC Twenty.22 (terrible speaker).

I wouldn't say the M106 was a massive improvement, and both speakers were very enjoyable. But in the end I just wanted something that was a little more compact and could be the basis for a possible surround setup. All in all it cost me €700, sold the old speakers for the same amount I bought them for years ago :D.
 
Another idea - post noteworthy speakers, what they changed, and when introduced.

AR - acoustic suspension allows smaller speakers
Advent - about 1970? (I'm not sure what they did better than the ARs...)

Rogers mini-monitors...
What Advent did better than AR was to provide slightly better sound (according to Kloss, who designed both of them) at half the price.

But it brings up an interesting aspect of this whole discussion. Henry Kloss experimented with all sorts of cone materials, voice coil materials, and basket attachments to find something that was inexpensive to manufacture but musically effective. What small company like the startup Advent of 1969 would actually make their own drivers? Advent did. And one thing the Advent had that AR did not was a next-level tweeter design. Some don't think much of the Advent fried-egg tweeter now, but in 1969, Kloss found that the shape (a central dome surrounded by a waveguide shape) had flexibility relative to frequency. At high frequencies, only the central dome did much radiating, while at mid-range frequencies, the whole surface radiated. Thus, the tweeter was able to project substantial acoustic power even down into the mid-range, which permitted a simple crossover at a rather low frequency (something like 1500-1800 Hz, and none too steep at that). The woofer design was damped by the sealed cabinet.

Advents rolled off above 15 KHz, but we've already had the discussion on this forum many times that this is hardly the most damaging thing to actual music, particularly acoustic music. In the late 80's, I compared my Advents from 1977 to Magneplanars at a "high-end" store in San Antonio where I lived at the time. This was not a blind test, but the differences were enough to guard against domination by subconscious bias. After listening back and forth, I asked the guy at the store (who owned the store and was one of the few who was really excellent) if he thought the Magneplanars sounded like frying bacon--just too much sizzle in the high end. His response: "Yes, I suppose they do." When Advent fans use the word "smooth", they mean the high end didn't sound brittle like that, and that may be anathema to people who study measurements today. I'm not exactly sure that it is necessary for speakers to be linear to 20 KHz, because a lot of what they will transmit won't be music anyway, at least from many real sources. We were listening to an LP played on a Linn Sondek LP12, reasonably close to the state of the art in the late 80's. We also listened to a CD, played in my brand new Magnavox CDB-650, which the store owner thought was one of the best available (I agreed and I still agree, if I can find the right belt for it).

Yes, there are lots of better speakers now, but there are also lots of speakers that simply can't do what those bigger acoustic-suspension speakers did, in terms of bass impact that doesn't boom or ring. I think there was a big change with Thiel-Small calculations that led to the universal use of small, ported cabinets, usually coupled to subwoofers to make up for their limitations. These are much pickier about placement, in my experience, particularly in relation to the back wall (and depending on which way the port aims). The smaller box, with prettier veneers and grills, became the dominant paradigm below the very high end, and nobody wants to find a spot for those big Advents, AR's, KLH's, and so on.

I'm always considering speakers, and I auditioned quite a few a couple of years ago. I found that anything below about $2000 a pair did not make a brass quintet sound like a brass quintet. This is subjective and subject to all sorts of derision here, and I don't know what measurements affect my impression (I am sure what I hear is measurable)--maybe it's mid- or upper-bass response. The audition circumstances certainly affected it. But the French horn sounded like a trombone, and the tuba sounded like a euphonium, and the orchestral sound of the trumpets leaned in the direction of a bright jazz sound (think Harry James or Herb Alpert rather than Miles Davis). I was listening to a Canadian Brass CD, and was quite familiar with it. Also, I have played on the same stage with the Canadian Brass on two occasions, and I play regularly in my own brass quintet, so I know what the real thing sounds like. I'm also highly attuned to the sound of individual players and instruments--certainly the outcome of a training process. Surprisingly to me, many of the modern, small speakers simply could not create a realistic timbre for brass instruments.

Advents do. I can listen to that CD through my two pairs of Advents, powered by two B&K amps, at so-called reference volume (peaks at well over 100 dB SPL), walk into the next room (to disconnect my eyes from the sensory process), and it sounds just like a real brass quintet playing in the next room. Making it sound like that requires filling the room with sound, and it seems the small speakers for sale these days simply don't do that. (My room is 15x24, with a sloped ceiling that slopes up from onen side to open into a loft area that has about the same volume, so volume is relatively high but without that many opposing parallel walls). Modern Pioneer cheapies (the SP-BS22LR) have the right timbre, though with a ported-speaker boominess in the mid-bass in comparison with my Advents, but only if I'm relatively close. (I use them for my office system, driven by an Adcom 535.) An old pair of Canton GL260's that I own, which are not really bigger than the Pioneers, have a bit less bass but a realistic sound for a small listening room.

One thing I rarely see measured in loudspeaker tests (with the partial exception of Amir's tests, which measure distortion with respect to SPL up to a point) is the maximum SPL capability of the speaker. Those big drivers in the speakers of old could make loud sounds, while the current inexpensive speakers with drivers of 6" or less just can't, it seems to me, when listening in a larger from 15 or 18 feet away. Now, if someone wants really loud sound, they are directed to horn-loaded speakers, and certainly horn/wave-guide designs have improved over the years from the (inappropriate for home-use) long-throw exponential horns of the past to bi-radial, wide dispersion horns of the present.

Those Advents were a hundred bucks each in the 70's (I paid $115 each for my first pair of NLA's in 1977). I bought the second pair a couple of years ago for the same price (in actual dollars). In real dollars, they would still be inexpensive relative to the market, though I doubt any company like Advent during the pre-Jensen years could do at the same cost point what Advent did in making their own drivers right from the start.

There are no useful measurements of old Advent Loudspeakers (either the 1969 originals or the 1976 replacement that used ferrofluid to cool and damp the tweeters to allow the crossovers to drive them even harder) that I can find on the internet, and I'm thinking the size of these cabinets would make it rather inconvenient to send a pair in carefully restored/maintained condition to Amir. So we have only subjective opinions (including mine) to feed comparisons with modern speakers. But I haven't heard much in anything approaching the same price range that can make as much sound, while still maintaining what is at least an accurate enough frequency response to make brass instruments sound like themselves, and do so with peaks up to 105 dB SPL.

Rick "who'd love to see a Klippel test of restored Advent OLA's or NLA's" Denney
 
Thx!

i guess we should mention that the ARs, which we think of as 'big' today, were actually the initial shot fired by the acoustic suspension speakers, which essentially replaced or wiped out the really big "hiFi" speakers like horns.

They "ruled" for a while, then were essentially wiped out by the Thiel-Small 'solution' to ported designs, which is the most common speaker design today.
 
Archimago did some measurements of the Spendor SA1 from 1976. The better modern speakers are smoother on-axis and off-axis response, but it seems like the gulf is narrower than I would have thought.

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2021/02/retro-measure-spendor-sa1-1976-monitor.html
Thank you for that. It shows that old acoustic-suspension speakers need not be much of a compromise compared with modern speakers.

Rick "who'd still love to see the same measurements for Advent Loudspeakers" Denney
 
I posted this in another thread, but we got this in 1983:
index.php

My take is that the real loudspeaker innovations are: widespread computer simulation use during design, flawless coaxial drivers (KEF and Genelec), perfected/cheaper DSP and more "advanced" LF directivity control outside the PA domain.
 
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The title of the group "How much have speakers improved over the past decades?" was promising. Looking through the lens of television development over the last twenty years: only resolution and type of screen. Yes, that's another!
I bought Sabaj A30a, I have only digital sound sources and fifteen year old Wharfedale diamond 9.6 speakers (release year 2003, height 106 cm). Does it make sense to replace these speakers? They are in good condition. How justified can I replace the much younger Wharfedale diamond 240 or Klipsch R-620F, Focal Chora 816 or others praised for the last two years – €500-800 or Wharfedale 4.4 (higher class). I have no experience with other speakers. We were monogamous! The big centers are far away and I can't order three pairs and return two.
Please an objective answer: the development of technology - the age of my speakers and neutral advice for new speakers.
 
For DACs and amplifiers it is clear a lot of improvement has been made over the past decades.
It all depend what kind of improvement you are talking about, more efficient with electricity and less expansive to buy, yes, for anything else we have had great soundind/measuring amplifier for many decades.
I can see how a lot of active Hifi speakers are pushing limits,
Again, active is nothing new and the new generation does not provide anything we have not had for a very long time. Some model are accessible at better pricing because of how and where they are manufactured, but that is about it for advantages.

How we control the sound in rooms is the only field where we have had advancement and it works with older amps and older speakers as well as with new stuff.
 
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