Comment by array_key_first
8 hours ago
If anything I'd say speakers have only gotten shittier as screens have thinned out. And it used to be fairly common for people to have dedicated speakers, but not anymore.
Just anecdotally, I can tell speaker tech has progressed slowly. Stepping in a car from 20 years ago sound... pretty good, actually.
I agree that speaker tech has progressed slowly, but cars from 20 years ago? Most car audio systems from every era have sounded kinda mediocre at best.
IMO, half the issue with audio is that stereo systems used to be a kind of status symbol, and you used to see more tower speakers or big cabinets at friends' houses. We had good speakers 20 years ago and good speakers today, but sound bars aren't good.
On the other side being I needed to make some compromises with my life partner and we ended up buying a pair HomePod mini (because stereo was a hard line for me).
They do sound pretty much ok for very discreet objects compared to tower speaker. I only occasionally rant when sound skip a beat because of WiFi or other smart-assery. (Nb: of course I never ever activated the smart assistant, I use them purely as speakers).
A high end amp+speaker system from 50 years ago will still sound good. The tradeoffs back then were size, price, and power consumption. Same as now.
Lower spec speakers have become good enough, and DSP has improved to the point that tiny speakers can now output mediocre/acceptable sound. The effect of this is that the midrange market is kind of gone, replaced with neat but still worse products such as soundbars (for AV use) or even portable speakers instead of hi-fi systems.
On the high end, I think amplified multi-way speakers with active crossovers are much more common now thanks to advances in Class-D amplifiers.
I feel like an Apple TV plus 2 homepod minis work well enough for 90% of people’s viewing situations, and Apple TV plus 2 homepods for 98% of situations. That would cost $330 to $750 plus tax and less than 5 minutes of setup/research time.
The time and money cost of going further than that is not going to provide a sufficient return on investment except to a very small proportion of people.
Speakers haven't gotten a lot cheaper either. Almost every other kind of technology has fallen in price a lot. A good (single) speaker, though, costs a few hundred euros, which is the same it has pretty much always costed. You'd think that the scales of manufacturing the (good) speakers would bring the costs down, but apparently this hasn't happened for whatever reason.