Hands down and far and away the biggest advance in amplification in recent years has been the development of the built-in and custom designed amplification found in high-end mastering studio quality active speakers. There’s still plenty of people who seem to find much pleasure endlessly tweaking, swapping around, ruminating about, and spending inordinate amounts of money on old-fashioned external amps, interconnects, and passive speakers. Enjoy away. But overall and dollar for dollar, the latest top-quality active speakers with line-level crossovers and amps designed specifically and precisely for each *driver* in the speaker very often perform startlingly better than old-fashioned separates. The actual technical details of well-designed internal amplification for active speakers is largely irrelevant.
Amplification: what are the biggest advances of the last 40 years?
As an audiophile most of my adult life but without any engineering expertise, I wonder how amplification has advanced since I started in this hobby as a high school student in the eighties?
Specifically, what has advanced the state of the art and what, specifically, make newer products sound "better" than older ones?
Is it that circuit design has advanced so much? Or is the bigger difference parts quality and the technology leading to these better parts?
And please, none of the banal "it all matters" comments. What I'm asking: which of the above matters the most?
Specifically, what has advanced the state of the art and what, specifically, make newer products sound "better" than older ones?
Is it that circuit design has advanced so much? Or is the bigger difference parts quality and the technology leading to these better parts?
And please, none of the banal "it all matters" comments. What I'm asking: which of the above matters the most?