Loudspeakers have we really made that much progress since the 1930s?

     It might be useful to think about the evolution of the automobile as an analogy here. A car from the 1930s would be immediately recognizable to us, but over time cars have gotten lighter, smaller, safer, they handle better, are more reliable, routinely go faster, are more efficient, and the list goes on. These improvements (and yes, I think we can all agree that these are improvements) might also be said of speaker design. The industry has access to vastly improved measuring techniques, materials, and about a century of design experience to draw on. Fundamentally, the components of a car haven't changed much since the 1930s: an engine, transmission, suspension, steering mechanism, exhaust system, and a body to enclose it all. Same with speakers: a magnet, a basket, a vibrating membrane...

     What HAS evolved in a major way since the 1930s is music itself and therefore how we listen and what we listen to. Every day, we hear sounds my grandparents could never have imagined. Reproducing those sounds requires innovation not only in speaker design but also in amplification. I'm wondering if the invention of the transistor might not have been one of the driving forces behind speaker design and innovation over the last 50 years or so, and now that we're in the early(ish) days of the popularization of class D amplification, what changes might that precipitate, us having grown so used to today's hyper-resolving electronics?

I'd like to propose that speaker design over the years has advanced hand-in-hand with amplifier design. What would a set of Raidhos sound like, I wonder, hooked up to whatever amplifier was available in the 1930s? What would a 1930s speaker sound like hooked up to a Devialet class D amplifier? (I don't actually know the answer, just though it might be worth asking).