Loudspeakers have we really made that much progress since the 1930s?

(johnk)
"Mapman whats missing- realistic sound quality, the ability to allow listener to feel the emotion of the music. The ability to easily hear the mix ie pick out the individual instruments and vocals along with the added studio work. Realistic image size and dynamic range.The at ease at any SPL the ability to sound wonderful out of sweet spot and through out home. Extreme lack of listening fatigue. A clear real sounding vocal ability the ability to do this all on massively low power. Extreme reliability and ease of service in field by owner. Today most all of this is missing and if present only a small part of it."

I also disagree. Vintage speakers of high efficiency really don't play bass right, they are less detailed and harsher due to breakups in the various drivers and they don't handle power well (are less reliable). So the statement above seems false on all counts.

I believe johnk (in the top paragraph) addresses what he feels is sonically missing with most of todays modern speakers (or the present state of reproduced sound in general), and whether his point of reference in stating this is vintage speakers or not is irrelevant; it's still what he finds is missing.

What does it even mean to "play bass right"?

There seems to me to be something fundamentally different in the way these [vintage] speakers play bass compared to modern speakers with their super dead cabinets and incredible fast, tight and really deep bass. While these speakers sound very impressive their bass just doesn’t flow within the performance like these older-design speakers. The bass on these newer speakers is definitely deeper, faster and has more slam, but they just don’t have the life in the bass that the more vintage designs do. All of the speakers above have incredible air and harmonics in the bass. You feel the bass. Yes, you feel the bass with the modern speaker as well, but differently. The bass from modern speakers with extremely dead cabinets has a very pistonic sound. To me, real music seldom sounds this way, occasionally rock music does, but it also often sounds purposefully distorted.

http://www.dagogo.com/beatnik-pet-peeve-3-way-modern-speakers-play-bass

To me, a lot of audiophile quality double bass is too closely miked- you hear things that even the player probably doesn’t hear. I think that is intended to create an immediacy, but real bass doesn’t sound like that in a club. Piano, to me, is also a tough instrument. Sometimes, very simple recordings are best- but many lack the weight and heft of a real piano in the lower registers and sound two dimensional; to compensate, sometimes the instrument is very closely miked in the same way I described the bass, above. When recorded with other instruments, it sounds out of proportion.
The more modern, big heavy weight bass sound is great for "thwack" but there’s also stuff going on above- the "air," the skin sound, the tonality of a drum beyond the explosive movement of air. I think it is hard to get it all. I’ve always suffered a bit of a trade-off b/c to me, it starts (and often ends) in the midrange-  bandwidth, imaging, soundstage, whatever audiophile attributes you ascribe to as important are pretty irrelevant if the thing sounds reproduced.

Atmasphere keeps stating debatable or simply wrong things in a categorical manner.
I think, what John is talking about is music lover's speakers versus hi-fi speakers. I am not familiar with high end vintage speakers, so won't comment, but there is something artificial in many modern speakers, they are sort of 'digital'.

I agree, Inna. I solve that by replacing the nickel and dime components in the crossovers. A single electrolytic cap in the signal path creates an unpleasant haze of high frequency distortion, which one identifies with digital. Red Book CD digital absolutely requires a 22 KHz brick wall filter, because otherwise truly horrific distortions arise (i.e. aliasing). Who among the digitizers would bother with $50 capacitors? Hence distortion for the multitudes.

I can make Magnepans or Quads absolutely sing, simply by replacing or bypassing distortion-producing cheap components. With an analogue source, of course.

I should have made clear that I agree about the "digital" aspect of many modern speakers.

I do not agree about Atmasphere, who I regard as highly expert.