Speakers: Anything really new under the sun?

After Jim Winey invented Magnepan speakers, the rest were simply not important.

IF you want speakers that reproduce WHAT YOU FEED THEM, this is your choice.  Then, you can fine-tune your electronics and source information.

If you start with speakers that do not color the sound, you are starting correctly for only hearing what you provide.

Do NOT believe me.  Go to a shop and listen for yourself, then have the dealer bring a pair to your house and listen IN YOUR ROOM.

Cheers!

The short answer is "yes", but if you put it on a graph it would look like a "smiley face" with the biggest gains at the budget level and extreme high ends.  The mid-band of the range has been generally getting it right for quite a while.  Gains in this range are better, but incremental.

To the OPs specific case, I'm with @realworldaudio on this one.  Improving parts quality in an existing speaker can prodce stunning results with the speaker fighting well above its weight (price?) class in transparency, detail, and emotional impact.  Spending more money on a speaker that incorporates low-to-medium quality crossover components is like spending big money on a turbo upgrade for your car, and driving around with the parking brake on.  Taking the parking brake off is a good first step.

We drill down pretty deep into speaker upgrades and modifications.  Our rule of thumb is to have an upfront converation about the speaker they are aspiring to own.  Then, set an upgrade limit of 40% of that cost as a budget to upgrade the client's existing speakers.  Above that, the additional investment in improving internals may not overcome the gains made by improvements in newer/better drivers, stiffer cabinets, etc.  So, we get off at the 40% exit.  This approach will, without question, have an outcome that will do MANY things better than a newer, more expensive speaker of a similar design.  In the OPs example, I would set a budget top end at $800 (40% x $2k).  This will allow for the installation of serious crossover components (and, other upgrades) and allow the speaker to perform as the original designer intended. I'm not trying to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa.  Just geting things out of the way that make the speaker sound worse.

If you are handy with a soldering gun, you can perform the work yourself.  If not, the crossovers can be removed, shipped off, and returned to you with all the "goodies" installed -- including the pigtails (using quality cable, of course) ready to solder to the raw driver's input lugs.  I've taken in speakers that, to put it mildly, were not my Top Ten list of favorites.  Then, found myself actually enjoying listening to them after the performance mods.  Just think what will happen when you already enjoy the sound of your speakers?

Borresen, Magico, YA, all pushing the envelope-- but also very expensive.  Listen to Borresen if you get a chance.  The best speakers in the world IMHO.

Better materials, better measuring tools, better understanding of human preferences, more powerful computers for analysis, more on line reviews and impressions....but in the end it all comes down to how does the system sound to you in your room with your music...and unfortunately, even with Room Perfect and all the other room improvement systems, there is still a fair amount of trial an error.

Until you try it in your home, you can't know for sure.

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.