Are advances in technology making speakers better?
B&w every few years upgrades there speaker line and other manufacturers do this to. But because I have the earlier version does this mean it's inferior? Cable manufactures do the same thing.
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.
I am so confused what should I do?
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- 120 posts total
@holmz , the technology was the same a century ago but speakers had different requirements. Given the state of amplifier development, efficiency was a very important issue if you wanted to fill a whole theater with sound. Now we have CAD tech to help us design loudspeakers. Back then it was slide rules. I appreciate old loudspeakers for what they are, speakers designed with different priorities. As a group they tend to be very efficient and very colored which phusis obviously likes. Coloration in the older speakers interferes with the generation of a decent image. phusis will now tell you that his speakers image fine. They do not because they can't. It is like asking a bus to fly. Buses and airplanes are transportation but have vastly different capabilities. Yes, I have listened to a bunch of ancient loudspeakers from Altec, EV and JBL. I like the old Bozaks the best:-) |
@mijostyn wrote:
CAD tech only gets you so far. What’s its use when applying it to a frame generally too puny and inefficient, other than potentially making smaller speakers better? You would have to appreciate the difference large size and high efficiency offers, other than from a panel speaker (sans high efficiency), but leaving the importance of it to a bygone ear and different segment of use only falls back on you wanting to make general what you fail to savor nor understand. And btw the best designers back then knew how to make more use with a "slide rule" than most do with CAD design today. Combine the two, another matter.
Coloration, it could be argued, is many things also by "virtue" of absence: lack of image size and dynamics, scale, ease, physicality, presence, etc. - traits where most modern speakers fall short. You don’t hear it as coloration per se, but when you know the difference it makes you also realize how much less alive, visceral, real and emotional the experience gets. I’d be glad trade in a bit of coloration in what’s typically expected of it to be (and that’s assuming it’s even there) with mentioned traits, but obviously you don’t know and don’t care to know what I may or may not be missing out on, nor what I gain with your staunch generalizations and assumptions.
Oh, but they do, and again: you wouldn’t know. And your analogy is about as meaningless as can be. An actually relevant one would be that of referring to the Apollo space program. Back then in the 60’s (and early 70’s) they went to the moon with the computational power available to them at the time. Could they have revisited the moon in the meantime with more modern tech? Sure, if they wanted to, but they didn’t - and that’s the point. Oh well, what’s the use of speaking to a door, a closed one no less.
Says one individual. |
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