Speakers: Anything really new under the sun?

@johnk 

In the 1920s-30s, the world's largest corporations used nearly unlimited resources and the best engineers around to design almost all loudspeaker types we use today.

Some from that era are still considered to be wonderful sounding and are highly desired today. 

http://www.audioheritage.org/html/profiles/lmco/shearer.htm 

https://www.martinlogan.com/en/electrostatic-loudspeaker-history

An excellent post that supports what many of us have been saying.

High performance loudspeakers were already capable of great performance decades and decades ago.

The main area targeted by research nowadays seems to be focused around designs that are considered to be 'domestically acceptable'.

For sure, many of us here are prepared to sacrifice a certain amount of domestic acceptability (if not quite the Shearer Horn) for sonic gain, but evidently the vast majority of loudspeaker buyers are not.

Perhaps therein lies the problem as it's difficult to see how relatively small slim tower speakers can ever sound as good as some of the behemoth designs featured in the 2 websites linked above.

The fact that some of these new designs, despite the size constraints,  have even gotten fairly close is a testament towards some of the design breakthroughs we have seen in the last few decades.

Especially when set up carefully in a sympathetic room with a sympathetic system driving them.

@strawj 

Very true. Nothing really new at any price point tho I still like a standard Brit Box as much as anything. All else is window dressing.

Absolutely. To think out of the decades old box is fairly easy, I'm sure we could all do it, but to bring it to the market takes an awful lot of ingenuity and guts.

The usual obstacles of price and consumer expectations are always there obstructing your way.

The biggest one, however, may be that undefeatable foe, domestic acceptability.

It's so formidable, that it's even more or less seen off most of those large loudspeakers that previous generations got to enjoy.

I was at lecture where I heard a prominent designer unabashedly declare that he began his new design from the premise that it must be domestically acceptable.

That is to say, a slim cabinet.

Of course, there are always constraints in anything you do, but to see sound quality demoted in such a way is always disappointing.

Therefore we should always give credit to designers like Hiroshi Kowaki who bring us products like the TD712z, or Lawrence Dickey with his dynamic Vivid Audio speakers. 

Neither of these designs can be called your typical box, but alas neither also seemed destined to be commonly found either.

The TD712z mark 2 is certainly the speaker I'd most want to hear.

It's already well over a decade old and still no sign of a mk3. I guess when your working at the periphery of what is possible, time moves slowly.

@taxonomy

Also, I’ll just throw this out there, my wife and I were outside in kind of a pavilion we have with some Dayton outdoor speakers and a chip amp. We were listening and both of us turned to each other and were like "does this sound insanely amazing?" I was checking behind me to see if I had installed extra speakers there or something. It was absolutely amazing. Maybe it was just a nice day and we were outside, but I would put that listening session up against small house money systems I’ve heard.

I’ve had this happen too, once or twice and in my case I’ve tended to put it down to some psychological effect.

I don’t know.

In any case it was actually a bit annoying on one occasion when my brother played back this cheap ferric tape on my NAD tape deck and it sounded way better (image size, transients, dynamics) than my own chrome tape recordings done at home via my LP12 turntable.

Slightly taken aback, I asked my brother to find out more about how this tape had been recorded. It turned out to be a common or garden all in one music centre!

I’m pretty sure now that it wasn’t a psychological trick but back then my audiophile sensibilities couldn’t accept it as anything other than a as yet unknown anomaly.

Reminds me of the old Groucho joke, ’Who you going to believe, me or your own eyes?’

@pedroeb

Cabinet resonances can be reduced but can they ever be reduced below the threshold of human hearing?

Not to say that electrostatics and open baffles are perfect, but isn’t one of their major advantages the lack of a cabinet?