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

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.

I think that one big bit of progress (that hasn't seemed to come much to the attention of the audiophile world yet) is the Danley-type Synergy horns.  Yes, horns were around in the 30s, and coaxial speakers too, but a single wideband fullrange horn device that behaved like a point source wasn't.