What brand was better than it is today?

As a brand: Theta Digital.

Not necessarily for product quality, but lack of innovation and introduction of new products.


As a huge fan of the old Casanova I was really looking to see the replacement, the Supernova come out, but it never made it out of the prototype stage.


This is a brand that has been relegated to back-burner stuff for a while. They promised HDMI compatibility for what, 2 years, then they introduced I think 2 new versions of the casablanca, some new Class D amps, and now are back to barely operating publicly. The last press release of theirs was in June of 2017:

https://www.thetadigital.com/press-releases/




Best,

E

Threshold, Marantz, Mark Levinson, Martin Logan, Pass Labs, Revel, B&W, lots of others. The problem with the question is relativity. Rega was once the 2nd best turntable, for example, now they don't make the list at all.

Everything was better sounding 30 or 40 years ago because there was a lot less RF floating around in the air.

The other problem is that many people don't get the distinction between sound reinforcement, pro audio gear and that designed to reproduce music.
JBL and Klipsh for example have never made good speakers for music reproduction. DJ turntables sound aweful compared to a Pro-ject or Clearaudio. 

But musicloversaudio, rap-“DJ”s only use turntables for serato time code, because they don’t care about sound quality - it’s only rap.