One of the main statements i often hear is that price has no reflection to quality, and I sincerely belive that.
And I 100% belive that the law of diminishing returns applies rather early in components and a little later in speakers.... but to make such a broad range statement as you just made is exactly what I am talking about.
You state that a couple hundred dollar speaker is "good enough" by metric of diminishing returns (your words) and DSP will assist to bridge that gap.
Actually it was just such an exercise that made me an ardent believer in DSP. I had just purchased a pair of the high performance Infinity Preludes (steep discount: 50% of $8K) that were the first flagship product after Harman Int'l had bought Infinity and applied the research findings to a four way of modest tower size. As luck would have it, I just bought a DEQX and was in the process of setting up some DIY speakers using the 50" B&G ribbons and had little idea of how and where to cross them over to the bass sections. And because I was in a buying mood, I also picked up a pair of modest JBL bookshelf 2 ways with a cool looking elliptical wave guide for the tweeters--these for the bedroom of my new home. They weren't bad out of the box, but I was curious how much they might be improved with DSP, and frankly wanted to get some experience before messing with $800 apiece drivers.
Well they say you can't make a silk purse from a sows ear, but you most certainly take a well behaved two way and make it over perform to such an extent that at modest volumes without a great deal of bass, it can sound very much like a bigger brother that sells for 15x as much. Anyway the Magnolia store wasn't crazy about taking the Preludes back, but in the end they did, and that was the last high end product I ever purchased.
The big B&G speakers were stunning in spite of my limited experience, and I have been doing DIY ever since. I'd much rather spend 1500 on drivers, build my own cabinets and voice the speaker to my preference than spending five or ten thousand for comparable commercial performance. It really is that simple. The best thing of all was getting off this revolving door of high end speaker buys--in one ten year period I bought Thiel, Infinity IRS, and Dunlavy speakers--the usual enchantment to dissatisfaction swing taking 3 years or so. And while I can't prove it, my belief is that had I DSP to address each of these outstanding but ultimately fatally flawed systems, I could have avoided that whole rat race/money pit altogether.
I very much doubt that any pair of speakers costing a thousand bucks would float my boat these days as the speaker needs to get down with serious bass extension and ear bleeding undistorted dynamics for my get your ya-ya's out moments. That's another great aspect of DSP--one can find very dynamically capable pro sound drivers that clean up quite nicely. Have my eyes set on some modestly priced Faital mid-basses that might just replace the somewhat prissy Scandinavian Skanning drivers I now use.
And no I don't think I can match a Perlisten, KEF Blade or my personal dream speakers--Sanders 10e hybrid electrostatics that maintain their composure beyond 115dB--with traditional cabinetry and off the shelf drivers. At some point the ability to bridge the gulf is so expensive and/or time consuming, and the instrumentation to so do (Santa, can you drop off a Klippel analyzer this XMAS?) just makes it prohibitive. But short of that, a decent mic, software and a few good power tools can be very rewarding.
DSP for the masses!
