Are future improvements in Amp/PreAmps slowing to a crawl?

I still have a pair of Radio Shack Optimus Pro LX5, which has the Lineaum tweeter. While it's no ESL, the tweeter is way better than a lot of domes.

Humidity, air temperature and air pressure should not be a SQ problem for anything the size of a living room or smaller.

In the early days of jazz, some bands (or house parties) are said to have been heard 1.5 to 3 miles away, and some say it was partly due to the high humidity in the NoLa air.

" I have seen the future, I can't afford it"

not really

i suspect Ralph is right
There are plenty of frontiers to be pushed back

i do have much much respect for Nelson and he is a deep thinker and a doer - you don't always see those together.. my first real high end amp was his 400, probably should have kept it...

the pount about what people hear hear and how is critical, iMO critical to moving forward in a science based way vs opinion on flavors...

for example 30 years of work at Vandersteen on the importance of preserving time and phase and now MQA and the recognition of spatial blur and human sensitivity to blur vs the IMO previous holy grail of flat response.

a systems thinker might say MQA is no advance if you feed a cleaned up temporal signal into an amp with high levels of negative FB

so IMO expanding the frontier is more about alignment of design philosophy across the system vs just box obsession...

putting my $ where my ears are
ordered Vandersteen amps

some innovations:

built in power conditioning
built in HRS isolation
no digital chips in the analog control circuits
unique topology with 5 parts in signal Paton emitervresisters
liquid cooled
list goes on
and on

so yes innovation alive and well
and frankly IMO a very exciting time in Audio

I said it before on this thread and I very much feel this is where the big improvements will be made:

One area that is a problem for all amplifier designs is that most are designed to have specs that look good on paper and are not really designed to also sound good. Now this is a simple engineering problem (understanding the rules of human hearing and designing to those standards rather than the existing set of arbitrary rules); the bigger problem is tradition- the tradition of how we say what are good measurements and what are not is at the heart of the issue. How do you get the industry to move off of standards set in place 60 years ago??

Until we fix *that* problem, progress will only be had by the outliers who are willing to buck the tradition and pay the price. And they are out there.

IOW its simple engineering, but if we apply our engineering to making equipment that looks good on paper, but at the same time does not acknowledge how the human ear/brain system perceives sound, then we won't make any progress.  We have to overcome the traditions of decades to do that- most of the specs we revere on paper were developed in the 1960s and a lot has been learned about human physiology since then!