Is the seated-centered solo listening to music a dated tech?

If I correctly understand what you’re saying, JohnK, then, yeah. I can easily imagine systems in the future comprised of 30 or 40 or more "sound generating devices" spread around the periphery of a space, maybe wall and/or ceiling mounted. They’ll be of some future technology that energizes the air to create the compression/rarefaction that is sound without the need for a moving mass driver. The amplification electronics will precisely measure and deliver to each device the exact amount of energy and frequency to create real performance presence. I’m not being glib as I don’t doubt we’ll get there and when we do people will look back at our chunky speakers with their moving diaphragms and dumb amps and pity us and wonder why we’d even try to reproduce music that way. But we’re not there yet.

@surfcat Actually, we may be closer than you think. Not sure if you’ve heard of the BACCH technology, but it looks pretty impressive and those who’ve heard it have been pretty amazed (apparently it works wonders with headphones too). And it’s already available in several product forms from a company named Theoretical…
https://www.theoretica.us/bacch-dsp/

Heres some info on its development and technology at Princeton. Interesting stuff.
https://www.princeton.edu/3D3A/PureStereo/Pure_Stereo.html

I’d love to demo this at some point.

@redlenses03, I'm not talking about home theater, at least not as we envision it today but, rather, a truly transformative evolution in the collection and reproduced presentation of audio information that will undoubtedly happen given enough time and technological advancement.  We didn't always have stereo.  Adding separate low frequency devices already takes us out of the purely 2 speaker configuration to sometimes great benefit.  I also absolutely agree that a really good home theater audio set up is at best a mediocre to poor music audio system.  They may both like water, but one is fish and one is a duck.  quack quack

@au_lait, yes, part of the evolution will be genetic as well.  Many many ears, making most of our current hats obsolete.  We will be soooo good looking. 

@soix BACCH is dangerously interesting.  I know that many will reject it as interfering with pure reproduction, and they are not wrong.  But DSP is seriously impressive tech.  As we know, every component, every circuit or length of wire has a signature it adds.  What we often forget is every feature of the room also adds it's signature to the sound and that's where DSP can be so powerful.  I've heard it in the Kef LS50W where the onboard DSP was used to account for the speakers being placed on an open shelf and the result was very surprising.  If I hadn't seen them I'd have assumed they were appropriately placed in the room, away from the back wall.  Stage depth of lateral projection were very good for such little rascals.

@ddd1 You certainly point our one of the often overlooked challenges, miking.  Got to first collect the sound before one can even think about reproducing it.  I'm sure we'll get there.  I wonder what the arguments will be about in Audiogon a hundred years from now.  I think we can assume the power cord debate will never be settled