As a dude who follows the development of new technologies and innovations I can't help but feel like the audio department lags behind. As an example you could buy a TV now and it could be hugely outdated in five years. Or worse yet you could buy a smartphone which could be outdated and with dropped support as soon as in two or three years.
But then you look at audio market. Still one of the most used microphone, SM58, was first released in 1966. Or you could look at one of the most popular audiophile headphones, the Sennheiser HD 650, which was first released in 2003. Or the almost infamous (yet hugely popular) Beyerdynamic DT 990 which was first released in 1985. It seems everywhere you look in the audio deparment, the best selling thing in that category was first made at least decade or two ago. (with some exceptions like dacs and amps).
Sure there are the very expensive headphones like HD800S which are pretty recent but still. It's not like it's absolutely ground breaking difference when compared to something like HD650. Even more "recent" driver technologies like electrostatic or planar haven't completely changed the audio landscape.
Is it that audio doesn't get enough attention from the general public or why is it that it seems that audio hardware is so slow to improve? Have we already hit a technological wall where there isn't much room for improvement anymore? What do you guys think?
Hey at least in a way it's nice to know when buying expensive headphones or speakers that they are going to be relevant for years to come, but 
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I felt the same way before, and you know what? Audio became very egalitarian these days! IMO that mostly results from
following only the advancement, not having the full view of what people use.
Look, even by getting a low-cost smartphone, you're getting a decent DAC+AMP performance for headphones on most IEMs. We have pocket SOCs which easily overshadow many vintage components, while taking tens of thousands times less power - I'd hardly call that non-impressive.
Real progress happens in the mobile market. These days DSPs are EVERYWHERE, even a simple smartphone has an EQ that works better than anything vintage did!
Even headphones drivers progress - for instance, look at K371s transducer. You're getting a 50mm dynamic driver in closed package, which has some refinements to be made (e.g. all these 4k+ resonances) with THD ~1% in 95dB SPL - this is A LOT better than HD650s ever could do. Sennheiser also released HD560s, which are, again, a further refinement of the extension. Hell, look how effective current planars are - Anandas are possible to drive from a smartphone, much like K371s and HD560s! Compare that to Sony's MDR-7506 THD. Again - if that's not progress, then what is?
You're grossly overestimating the video segment, to be honest. Anything Full HD is still very recent these days; lots of satellite-based TV providers don't offer much over 1080p still, today. Some people don't even go forwards from 720p, many smartphones still work on that resolution. HDR10 still isn't a widely known standard, much like UHD and even 1440p.
Did you actually read that HDR10 is not being done properly? Standard asks for 1000 nits and yet even that one is not achieved these days, even in SOTA. The promise is real, but only the promise. And even with 1080p, you'd probably not want to know how heavily compressed the FHD material is on the satellite just to make it fit w/ hundreds of different channels. Netflix also compresses the material heavily, but they're squeezing the last bit (pun intended) of perceptibly unnoticeable lossy video compression to be had. With audio, we've seemingly been past the transparent region at the end of 90's. If having ~10-15x transparent compression for audio (e.g. Opus) is not a measure of progress, then what else is? The fact is that video is still far from achieving transparent compression. Video progress is mostly a fiction for a typical consumer, unless one jumps from SD to FHD bandwagon all at once.
The matter of using vintage hardware is not entirely because "it's better" - you can easily buy flat-measuring microphones (hell, even with calibration in package) for a lot less than what the tailored frequency ones go for. Why would you do that from a studio viewpoint, since musicians are interested in specific sound, not targetting the "flattest & most accurate" target, but some specific aesthetic. All this hardware is merely a tool. See what the noise floor of modern digital consoles is! Lowering the digital noise floor allows to make recordings better and more accurate to the artists' intention, with more and more processing possible. E.g. Steve Albini commented back in the days, that he uses tape simply because it does all what he needs from the start; not having him think through how to emulate. Still, not everything can be done acoustically and in a puristic mindset of avoiding DSPs.
IMO looking at SOTA is not what really matters - and believe me, I think there's nothing to be said that SOTA 8K sells. It does sell the 4Ks from the same vendor, though, merely because of exposure effect.
"SOTA" sells the low and mid price products! The audio SOTA might not be progressing in a steamroller fashion, but the median quality surely is.
And yet, the real future to be had is audio personalization, I guess that if we achieved that, we're done, FWIW.
* Solutions to reach the next step would probably be too spatially invasive.
That's probably hitting the nail straight on the head. Even 5.1 didn't catch, since it is too problematic to implement in spaces that didn't account for that.
