‘modern’, ‘mainstream’ speakers—too many models converging towards too similar a sound

Over the last year I’ve auditioned a good number of speaker makes and models.  Through this process, I developed a kind of shorthand for myself to describe a particular kind of sound profile that I kept encountering, one that I came to call modern/mainstream.

Here’s the kind of speaker I’m talking about: typically a floorstander, fairly tall, narrowish baffle, deeper than it’s wide, tweeter on top, midrange, two or three 7” woofers.  It’s a design you’re going to encounter again, and again, and again.  Dynaudio, Quad, Paradigm, Monitor Audio, Sonus Faber, and many, many others.  (Not picking on those five—just for illustrative purposes).  It’s also a design that tends to come from large companies, some of them conglomerates, and one which consequently finds its way into more stores and more people’s consciousness because of the larger distribution and publicity networks involved.

And the sound.  Highly competent across the board, tending to the more detailed rather than the more forgiving, treble range quite prominent, decent but not incredible bass extension, more than acceptable imaging and soundstaging, perhaps the vaguest hint of a mechanical or electronic veil.  And above all, kind of unexceptional and unexciting.  They can range all over in price, and they don’t really sound that dissimilar one from another.  They are converging towards that single ‘modern’, ‘mainstream’ sound profile that’s becoming a norm.  It’s a safe design, with an acoustic presentation that many people these days seem to prefer or at least accept (or have been conditioned to believe is ‘correct’).  Being fairly narrow, it integrates well into many domestic environments, and the styling usually ensures a decent measure of SAF.

While there are still many individualists out there in the audio world, and the speaker design world in particular, this is a general trend that I lament, because I see it expanding and being more entrenched.