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

Mapman,

There are a few areas where modest attempts to replicate older technology has failed to some degree.  I am sure that if there were the will and sufficient interest, the "lost" know-how could be overcome, but, that has not actually happened.  Several Japanese companies have tried to reproduce WE drivers over the years and have succeeded with some, but not all drivers.  Line Magnetic does field-coil versions of WE drivers (even when the WE were not field coil), probably for the same reason that the Japanese reproduction companies have mainly done reproductions of the field coil drivers--the magnets cannot be easily copied.  A friend spoke with one of the Japanese makers who acknowledged that they have tried to make certain drivers but could never get them to sound the same.  Admittedly, these are small builders, but, if there is no interest shown by the big houses, that is what one has to work with.

I think the best analogy for speaker design/build are musical instruments.  A lot of the "sound" of loudspeakers is in the designers voicing, not only the technology employed.  There has actually been quite a lot of attempts to make violins to sound like those made in Cremona 450 years ago, including instruments made with high tech polymers and carbon fiber impregnated material, metal, etc.  While some of these actually sound pretty good, I don't think that too many listeners would say that they "blow away" an Amati or Stradivari instruments.  The best newly built violins tend to be old-school instruments built in pretty much the same way as the 450 year old ones, with the maker voicing the instrument by ear, and not applying some high-tech approach.

The point was that technology, modern materials, etc., has not improved on something that is hundreds of years old.  If you think that there is some simple "ideal" of a perfectly neutral speaker and that there is some technical means of measuring and approaching such ideal that takes out of the picture the maker making subjective decisions, then you have not been around people that actually make speakers.

I am aware of the objective approaches, such as the work of Floyd Toole and the National Research Council of Canada.  But, there are plenty of listeners who simply don't like the resulting sound (like me, for instance) and that is probably why there is such a broad array of choices that people make in buying speakers.  Likewise, there is a broad array of different speakers being offered by designers because they happen to like different sounds and voice their designs accordingly.  It is naïve to think that there is a one-size-fits-all measure of what is closest to the "ideal speaker" that has no voice of its own. 

Here is our challenge, at various price points of your choosing, tell us what comes closest to the no voice of its own.  I will really go out on the ledge here, I bet there will be a whole lot of folks that will disagree with those choices.