The Golden Age of Audio could be today - that is, if we combined in a sense past and present; what was lacking then we have now, and what we lack now they had then. The good news is that, if we really wanted to, we could attain both in our present day world, but the sad part is that, pragmatically speaking, we don't really see the era of the past merged with the technology of today, and by that I mean the more uninhibited physics of mainly pro horn speakers of yore in tandem with the tech advances in the digital domain (incl. DSP), active configuration and developments in SS amplification.
We see advances in horn and waveguide geometry design aided through sophisticated CAD simulations, but at least in the domestic market those designs are typically stunted physically to cater to interior decoration demands - for aesthetic reasons, that is, not acoustic ones - and as such are not followed through to be and sound their best. The large pro horns of yesterday however, even as older designs, can really come out the other side with the best of both worlds when configured actively via DSP and more modern SS amps.
What we, crudely put, see today of the domestic old is often just that as a vintage, niche segment with analog source(s) - heralded as such, and often very pricey - and on the other hand we have all the modern stuff, which is to say largely inefficient and smaller speaker designs with a combo of higher power SS and (to a lesser extent) tube amp designs, and both digital and analog sources - with prices ranging into stratospheric heights as well. You could say the latter, modern camp is the more diverse one, but by and large the physics of speakers have been thrown out window.
Attaining that merger of old and new requires of one to very deliberately seek out the former, because it isn't readily available, if at all in stores today. Walking into many a contemporary hifi store is being met with the sight of endless rectangular speaker boxes - slim and deep, with the typical dome tweeter and array of smaller woofers - differentiated more or less only in size, i.e.. height and driver count. What those designs generally sound like, to my ears, is hardly anything mimicking live acoustic or amplified sound. The main focus of modern, low efficiency speakers appears to be soundstaging/imaging and to some degree tonality, but whatever happened to dynamics, proper size of presentation, ease, physicality and presence, all of which are core pillars emulating a live sound imprinting? Going further: what happened to the feel of music? What we hear today, to my ears, is mostly about the think of it.
