Speakers: Anything really new under the sun?

Borresen, Magico, YA, all pushing the envelope-- but also very expensive.  Listen to Borresen if you get a chance.  The best speakers in the world IMHO.

Better materials, better measuring tools, better understanding of human preferences, more powerful computers for analysis, more on line reviews and impressions....but in the end it all comes down to how does the system sound to you in your room with your music...and unfortunately, even with Room Perfect and all the other room improvement systems, there is still a fair amount of trial an error.

Until you try it in your home, you can't know for sure.

I’m going to mention a couple of brands which I think are doing really innovative things in an area of development I care about: driver arrays.

I’ve not heard them, sadly, but two brands stand out for me, and that’s Arion and Tekton. Both use multiple high frequency drivers and both have managed to really drive down the prices from what I’d expect, so a lot of the innovation here is that both brands have really broken the normal sales price to component cost ratios we see in almost all commercial speakers. Well done to both of them.

Both of these brands have also managed to bend the laws of physics and bring down the crossover frequency of their drivers significantly to make these arrays take over a broader range as well as leveraging acoustics to bend the speaker room interactions to their will.

Of course, they are different speakers, with different goals. Tekton achieves all of the benefits of a co-axial speaker with none of the drawbacks of doppler distortion,horn loading or having offset acoustical centers. Arion creates a broad-band line array that goes down to (forgot exactly) 100Hz or 200Hz. A remarkable achievement for AMTs. Given how AMT’s can be made very low distortion and vanishing amounts of stored energy I’m absolutely intrigued! In some ways this is like the Woofer-Assisted Wide Band designs I’ve seen, but in a line array!

In conclusion, yeah, there’s always some new exotic material being touted in driver design, whether in the driver, the construction of the surround, the voice coil former, or the spider. B&W, Focal, KEF and Monitor Audio and others have really pushed these ideas forward, but if you ask me what’s really interesting it’s in Tekton and Arion using arrays to bend a room to their will and making things possible at really remarkable price points for the offering.

Good comments above - I'll add a few points.

Like pretty much all manufactured products, the quality range has compressed as the industry has matured. There are hundreds (thousands?) of speaker models available now and for the most part they are all pretty good for their price points. This is due to thousands of refinements that keep improving the quality as the bar gets raised higher and higher.

Breakthroughs are few and far between. Every manufacturer wants to say that their cone material or their crossover design is revolutionary but it is just marketing hype. There are a few examples where the designer is truly doing something different, i.e. MBL, but even that technology has been around for decades.

If you can possibly swing it I would highly recommend that you go to an audio show. AXPONA is coming up but there are shows all around the country. There is just no better way to hear how different speakers compare.

I'm going to give my view on a related question. I have a Krell preamp (KRC-2) and amp (KSA 300S) plus a pair of Thiel CS6 speakers that all date from the mid 90's. I went to the 2018 AXPONA and I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that my system holds its own compared to everything but the megabuck systems. In a few cases my system sounded better, to my ears, than speakers costing 6 figures. I can't tell you how many systems I heard where the cords, cables, and interconnects cost more than my entire system and the sound wasn't anything special. Granted, my room is more optimized than a typical room at the hotel but if there has been some sort of breakthrough in the last 25 years I can't hear it.

There was one notable exception - the MBL room playing the 101 Extremes Mk II. The sound in that room was indeed different and better, at least to my taste. I went back again and again and concluded that this is the system I would own if I could afford it.

Look up Tekton Design speakers. They use a tweeter array to reproduce killer mid range. For me personally after a long journey of listening to many many speakers I stopped after being dumb struck by the Double Impact. THIS was the sound I was looking for.