are 4000$ /pr speakers today better than $4000/pr speakers from mid to late 1990's?

thanks all, great comments to let sink in for a while.  i'm sure it does depend, but i'm also pretty sure that design, approach, materials have gotten a lot better. throwing price in there can mux it up. that 705 review did have a lot of interesting comments!  some sad but who knows.

wow so here's some comments directly related to my post: in a 2015 review of paradigm prestige speakers.
https://www.stereophile.com/content/paradigm-prestige-95f-loudspeaker

Metal dome tweeters seem to sound less harsh but no less precise in current speakers than what I remember from speakers in the 90s.

@gdnrbob — I’m just going by what I hear.  I never liked the metal dome tweets and yellow Kevlar drivers used by B&W in the 90’s and beyond, and I find the Diamond tweeters and Continuum drivers to sound much cleaner and better as implemented in the current D3 models.  I’m not really a B&W fan, but I could live with the current 804 D3 and could definitely not say the same of the earlier 804N models.  Likewise, and as per the OP’s original question, I’d absolutely take a pair of 805 D3s over a 90’s era 803N.  That’s kinda where I was coming from FWIW, but to each his own.  

Old speakers would have gone through some extent of deterioration such as foam surrounds or internal, capacitors in the crossover etc. Personally I wouldn't consider speakers that are more than 20 years old.