Sound quality of Newer versus Older speakers

The one thing most are missing here is crossover parts quality. Mundorf and Dueland have turned the capacitor industry on their heads. Even Wilson is making their own caps now.

I changed out the Mundorf EVO caps on my Nola Viper 1AX's tweeters/mids to Mundorf Silver/Gold oil and the difference was NOT subtle and that's going from a very good midline cap to a top of the line caps. Resistors also fall in that line as well as inductors but caps are the most notable. 

In modern speakers, in general, tweeters are getting better. But mid and bass drivers are getting worse.
But there are number of exceptions. JBL produced excellent tweeters from end of 60x.
Dick Sequerra vintage ribbon tweeters (Pyramid T1, T9) are very good.
Modern full-range drivers like AER, Voxative, Fostex are very good.

But in general modern bass-midrange drivers trend is cost reduction! They can tell you about "state of the art" but it is lie!
All these low sensitive tower speakers with small, dull, reinforced concrete drivers don’t have any definition from mid-bass to upper midrange compared, for example, to these Jensen from 1920’s.
They also sound compressive and tiresome even is your power amp have a power of nuclear power plant.

The good new we can mix old and new technologies today. We can use best old and new drivers and modern crossover parts.

If you google the white paper for the Thiel CS6 speaker, you will find that Jim Thiel was addressing time and phase coherence and energy storage decades ago. All of the things that have been mentioned here is not new. I’ve had my CS6 speakers for 16 years now. They still thrill me, especially with my new monos and digital front end (vinyl is still king). Occasionally I get to hear some newer speakers but nothing good enough to drive me to change. The new Sasha DAW sounds good- nice bass. Still, I just can’t see them moving into my listening room. Oh, if they had thrilled me I would have tapped my 401 for them. I would like to hear the Magico’s sometime. 6 hour drive for me but why not? I’m retired and I got my 2nd shot yesterday.

@alexberger,

Great posts.

An historical perspective is usually a very good thing to have. No wonder so many would be 'influencers' might seek to belittle it or even eradicate it completely.

The reduction in size and the almost universal deliberate tilting of the FR means that accuracy is usually the first thing that's sacrificed.

Even in 2021 it's very difficult to find a pair of loudspeakers (or headphones) that have a flat frequency response.

Although it is encouraging that mastering engineers still seem to prefer loudspeakers to mix on as opposed to headphones.

[Apparently mixes done on headphones transfer to loudspeakers less well than those done the other way around].

Hopefully sites like ASR will continue to expose such practices and thereby give users advice on how to EQ these design characteristics out to match their taste and their room.

The very best example of imagery that I ever heard was during an audition of a Quad ESL. The baritone sounded palpably three dimensional between the speakers. 

So of course I had to buy them.

However my experiences at home were not so good (I later learned on here that my Naim amps were not the best match - the seller was using Quad amps, valve I think).

Still, I have to admit that no speaker that I've heard since  (>25 years ago) has been able to recreate such 'reach out and touch' imagery as those Quads did.

There is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence suggesting that loudspeakers are getting better, but are they?

Well, if they are, then perhaps folks like Amir at ASR will be able to demonstrate that in due course.

Spendor BC-1.