It's like with everything else, like a super modern kitchen with a
crappy cook, a F1 car with a crappy driver, 100mpx camera with a stupid
photographer and so on. Technology has to be driven...it doesn't drives
itself. Big companies are often driven by financial targets and less y
passion and commitment.
Sound quality of Newer versus Older speakers
From a sound quality perspective, is there anything that newer speakers are doing better than older speakers. For reference, I have a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 300s which are amazing me with their ability to balance detail retrieval with an ability to avoid harshness (with the right ancillaries). My subjective perception is that this type of balance between resolution and refinement was more difficult to find in speakers from 20-30 years ago.
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Are there differences due speakers being voiced to the music of their era? I remember hearing Dylan's "Desire" on some 70 era's monitors with big, sloppy woofers, and thinking, "Wow, this is really right." Sort of like movies' voicing of natural speech changing over time: surely nobody actually talked like that in the 70s? :) |
Newer, by far. Cone materials are far superior, even more so at the lower end of the spectrum. Ditto techniques for reducing varying inductance effects. Better capacitors. Far less cabinet resonances. More consistent dispersion.Most of "new materials" are cost reduction and marketing. Best cones are paper cones. Best magnets are field coil follow by alnico. Especially it is true for people who listen classical and jazz music. Even rock music and sounds much better on 15 inch paper cone speakers like 70x JBL. If you listen modern POP music that was mastered for boombox, why do you need Hi-End system at all? |
Older audiophiles like the comfort of their old colored music. It works for them. It does not work for everybody. Most of "new materials" are cost reduction and marketing. At what price point? That is not true at all at the high end. Not even close. Alnico is a magnet material type. There is far more to a motor than the magnet type. |
alexberger said: "So when I go to friends or audio show I always hear compression from most of low sensitive speakers. Even big speakers like Wilson Audio. I feel it like a heavy, strained sound reproduction, unnatural, tiresome. Sound presses and it cause me a discomfort." I really agree with this. Low sensitivity speakers don't have the same sense of ease as high efficiency speakers, especially (but not exclusively) horn speakers. |
as i think about this, modern technology as it applies to speakers is mostly limited to new materials used for transducers... makes for strong and light and cheap (or some better combo of the 3)... -- so this capability should make transducers more accurate, more damped (less ringing), faster to move, faster to stop, etc etc - whatever the speaker designer is shooting for in measuring and voicing his product -- then, mass production of these more modern, economic materials allows for better sound to ’trickle down’ into less expensive speakers... -- not sure how much this affects really top end speakers, as great materials were available in the 80’s 90’s etc... they were just expensive to make and implement back then - now much of that technology and capability has matured and become more commonplace to me it is still mostly about the voicing and selective choice of various sympathetic resonances (call it distortion if you want, that isn’t offensive at all, if it makes the music sound more real and more beautiful) -- i do believe that even the proper recording, handling, storage and reproduction of music has a subtle ’bleaching/leaning/mechanizing’ effect, and so playback equipment that restores more richness and humanity to the sound is doing the end result a most positive service |
Hi @dletch2 , I didn't say all new speakers are bad. There are some good modern speakers. About colored sound it is not true. I'm am not old, just 47. People who go to classical concerts, play or listen acoustic instruments at home try to make their system sound as natural as possible. People who listen electronic music have not idea what is natural or colored sound, because nobody know how does it should sound. |
People who listen electronic music have not idea what is natural or colored sound, because nobody know how does it should sound.The only way to tune an audio system acoustically is the human timbre voice after that acoustical instruments... You cannot tune acoustically a system with commercial pop music and electronica.... Then you are right .... |
@alexberger and @roxy54 -- "So when I go to friends or audio show I always hear compression from most of low sensitive speakers. Even big speakers like Wilson Audio. I feel it like a heavy, strained sound reproduction, unnatural, tiresome. Sound presses and it cause me a discomfort." I’d agree with this as well, although some of the "molasses"-like imprinting described, from my experience, is also a by-product of passive cross-overs, like a slight softening of the sound - a bit more smeared and less transparent, even. Most high efficiency speakers are passively configured also, but here the effect appears less pronounced. |
Another thing to add to my post Covid list. |
