I’m going to mention a couple of brands which I think are doing really innovative things in an area of development I care about: driver arrays.
I’ve not heard them, sadly, but two brands stand out for me, and that’s Arion and Tekton. Both use multiple high frequency drivers and both have managed to really drive down the prices from what I’d expect, so a lot of the innovation here is that both brands have really broken the normal sales price to component cost ratios we see in almost all commercial speakers. Well done to both of them.
Both of these brands have also managed to bend the laws of physics and bring down the crossover frequency of their drivers significantly to make these arrays take over a broader range as well as leveraging acoustics to bend the speaker room interactions to their will.
Of course, they are different speakers, with different goals. Tekton achieves all of the benefits of a co-axial speaker with none of the drawbacks of doppler distortion,horn loading or having offset acoustical centers. Arion creates a broad-band line array that goes down to (forgot exactly) 100Hz or 200Hz. A remarkable achievement for AMTs. Given how AMT’s can be made very low distortion and vanishing amounts of stored energy I’m absolutely intrigued! In some ways this is like the Woofer-Assisted Wide Band designs I’ve seen, but in a line array!
In conclusion, yeah, there’s always some new exotic material being touted in driver design, whether in the driver, the construction of the surround, the voice coil former, or the spider. B&W, Focal, KEF and Monitor Audio and others have really pushed these ideas forward, but if you ask me what’s really interesting it’s in Tekton and Arion using arrays to bend a room to their will and making things possible at really remarkable price points for the offering.