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

larryi, Glad CAR exists and its a great option but there product in no way obsoletes vintage and I find it a bit funny that CAR was used as a example of advanced modern design since much of what they offer is cool modernized vintage design. And that would support my orignal assumption of how little progress has been made since the 1930s.

And we are still infinitely far from fully mastering the fire, whatever this means.

I thought we got past the limitations of horns about 35 years ago  - once transistor amplifiers became of good quality and allowed more power to be widely available.

Horns are simply not the best in terms of accuracy but they do deliver exceptional SPL for little power - great for live music sound reinforcement.

kosst agree that we may just be copying much of what came before with slight improvements and innovations with time and agree this could go as far back as fires discovery or farther. The reason that I point to the 1930s is that most of what we use today in loudspeakers was created in a  early spurt of innovation driven by early theater and telephone technology.. Might be  the telephones popularity and theaters going from silent to talkies that stimulated so much innovation but also at the time the largest corporations in the world put massive resources into creating it. This new technology also attracted some of the great minds at the time. Today audio technology design is of extremely low priority and is mostly done digitally. And is no longer attracting the best and brightest. I understand that being engaged by music is a fading activity and I really shouldn't be surprised by the lack of innovation and small time nature of companies that market such. We are a niche.