Are advances in technology making speakers better?

@jumia wrote:

How much more effort is required too perfect a speaker? my speaker is several years old and all the gear and the speaker are all broken in. And now I'm being told to upgrade.

You're not being told what to do, if anything you're letting someone tell you what they would like you to do. Don't let their business (incl. marketing crap) dictate your choice, instead make it the other way 'round and/or cut loose of it all and use what's available (from past/present, 2nd hand/new, DIY/preassembled, pro/domestic, etc.) to make your own preferred sonic meal - so-called advances in technology, peer pressure, dogma and paradigm be damned. 

It's about physics, implementation and quality/type of design. The first two are about scaling and the effort you/they out into getting the different pieces/parameters to intermingle properly, and the latter have been around for decades in a variety of shapes with nothing essentially new under the sun.

Mostly what it's about is no different now than it was many years ago. There have been important advances in digital tools, and class D amplifiers make for more compact active speakers (with the aid of digital tools) with potentially tons of wattages. Indeed, DSP tooling is a great asset with active speakers, and they needn't be small nor bundled solutions. 

At the core of things though what's out there is generally streamlined business ventures meant to make money from a package too small and wrapped in different yet stereotypical looking clothing to distinguish themselves and have excuses for design "upgrades." Any advances that are are not least about making something smaller with the least negative impact, but with speakers there's ultimately no escaping physics. 

My guess: if you were to hear and realize what even fairly priced, and perhaps in particular older, properly sized high efficiency speakers could do, you'd step off the merry-go-round of the "small, new and expensive" speaker category that seeks of you to make progressively deeper digs in your pockets and invest in their going-in-circles business hierarchy. Once the basics are right it's really about the implementation, and suddenly much if not most of the fancy new stuff just becomes irrelevant. 

They do it with cars too, just enjoy what you have as long as you like it. 

Do what everyone does when they don’t know what to do. Fire the drummer. 

Upgrade everything every forty years whether you need to or not. Donate your speakers and all the rest of your old equipment to an unwary, yet appreciative neighbor. You’ll experience a 100% sucess rate with this procedure and wont have to worry about it again for decades. Makes for a good nights sleep and spares the drummer any possible inconvenience.

They'd need to prove to you first that what they are offering to upgrade to is significantly better for you.

With the ongoing materials and components shortages, this may be not the case.

For instance, I remember a decade ago neodymium magnets were used in many new speakers, even budget ones. Now they are rarer. Ferrite rules.