Sound quality of Newer versus Older speakers

Good older speakers are just fine and usually represent excellent value. Really very little has changed in speaker design.

CnC was the changing point... From there forward, or from there back..

The only difference from that point was the material being CnCed
and automotive paint finishes. OAK and (?) were out and fancy computer designed manmade materials as veneers were in.. Epoxy/Polymer Dipped cabinets. Hard as the hubs of HELL.. Polish to an ultra high gloss finish.

Oh BTW all the new cabinets will self destruct and crawl out your door into your garden.. If you don’t have one. They will double for cat litter.. Expiration date is on the bottom..:-)

Other than some pretty fancy laser etching and water jet cutting. It’s a lot of Bling. Actually BETTER? They been making hand made cabinets onesies and twosies for a long time. 30-50k for hardwood cabinets and or exotic one of a kind veneers. Hand picked Seas drivers, or hand made ribbons/planars.. I’ve seen 3 sets, in my life and a fourth here on Agone a few months back.. The guy had 3 Custom built LS planar/ribbon speakers. He didn't say a word about cost.. So you know it was top of the line. I think is was a active servo column system..

Production speakers for a whole lot of money... there is a lot of that...
But better.. NO!!!

The oldest speakers I own are the Spica TC-50s, which are probably about 25 years old.  Properly set up, they sound about as good as any speaker I own, and I own quite a few.  

I agree with the above-poster about speaker technology not having changed much.  After all, 90 percent of them are various drivers in some form of a wooden enclosure.  

I'm of the mind, though, that most speakers (once past a certain price point) are all generally very good sounding, provided you have the rest of your gear/room setup to take advantage of any given speaker.  For example, huge speakers in a small room or tiny monitors in a huge room would probably not be ideal.

Newer is definitely not better in the speaker world, except when it is.

The speakers in my main system are 40 years old. I paid $264 for them about 4-5 years ago. They do some things remarkably well. I'm sure they can be bettered but I enjoy them tremendously. I just don't see any reason to spend 10X more for a little improvement when I'm already enjoying myself so much.

One area where I think we are in much better shape is in tweeter technology.

For a traditional speaker (not horn or ESL,etc.) tweeters have achieved remarkable extension and low energy storage. The innovation of the ring radiator moved the bar up considerably for what could be done with an inexpensive tweeter.  Top level AMT show remarkably low distortion or thermal compression in addition to extension.  It's easy to find tweeters that are flat through 20 kHz even among soft domes.

While the idea of Be tweeter diaphragms has captured the imagination, they vary greatly in quality and are now equaled or bettered by others.

Another might be how inexpensive really good film caps are now.