Speakers: Anything really new under the sun?

The biggest step forward was the improvement in the crossover parts quality. Mainly massive leaps in capacitor technology are responsible for most of the sonic improvements we hear over 20 years ago. Basically, take a top speaker from 20 yrs ago, change crossover parts to current high quality parts (caps, resistors, inductors, wiring, solder), and it will compete at the same level as top performers today.

AKA: you have a 20-30y old speaker you love, just bring the crossover up to our age, and you have arrived.

There was a trend though in the past 20 yrs: the voicing moving away from high fidelity to high end. That is, from a balanced natural sound towards a bigger show, enhancing apparent detail level at the cost of compromised tonality.

A second strong trend of the past 2 decades: loudspeakers are getting harder to drive, impedances are sinking lower, forcing you towards solid state amplification.  This provides lesser dynamic range and dependency on very high damping factor and high wattage.

A very few speakers from 20-40 years ago had no resonant cabinets.
But even today there are a lot of speakers with cabinet resonances.

There are a very limited number of cones that do not distort and changes shapes as breakup modes.

Some motors are more linear, but not every manufactures uses those… only a few.

Diffraction is better understood, but there are still lots of cabinets where diffraction is an issue.

Good designs from the past are still good today, and many speakers today and heavy on the marketing.

I think advancement in speakers is similar to advancement in other electronics like TVs and computers.  Many things are similar and there's amazingly good speakers at reasonable price points.

The higher in price you look - the companies have invested in computer modeling, material science efforts resulting in step change improvements.  A $500 speaker 10-20 years ago will not hold a candle to many of the $500 speakers of today.

Kef is doing a great job of innovating in recent years and are very transparent in communicating exactly what those innovations are and how the results  are actually measured as proof. 

@overthemoon

To add to that thought yesterday’s $30,000 speaker can’t hold a candle to todays $30,000 speaker.