My pet theory is that stupidly powerful rare-earth magnets, and class D amplifiers are the two main things that killed "hifi" type audio. No more black magic needed messing with transistors and op-amps on bespoke circuit boards that used to be the moat for these oldschool brands.
My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s. Now, a fair comparison would be to a modern floor speaker with modern magnets and amps, but I'm too old for this :-)
> My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s
I have a hard time believing this… yes today’s small devices sound better than small devices ever did. A lot of work went into that because people appreciate the reduced footprint. Also, those speakers are super cheap in comparison to the budget people would allocate to their stereo setups in the day.
But I’ve never heard a small speaker sound better than a 1970ies or later hifi amp + speakers from a decent brand. With big speakers you can reproduce all these frequencies without physics tricks. The sound is more laid back and the soundstage fills the room.
All the recent engineering has gone into making speakers small, cheap and wireless, like in the 90ies it went into creating multi-channel audio, but I would say stereo sound quality, as used for popular music, already peaked in the 70ies / 80ies.
Of course you can still get those quality hifi components today, or even better than that, but the median household is not listening on that and I’d wager has worse sound today than was the norm in the physical media era.
In the 80s and 90s the world moved to 6.5-or-less bookshelves which generally struggle with bass compared to a lot of modern smaller stuff. Meanwhile a lot of music started using low bass a lot more.
In addition to this, front baffle width correlates with efficiency, i.e. modern narrow front baffle speakers need a more powerful amp, combine that with the necessary smaller bass drivers and you see why most modern speakers have crap bass
1. In the modern family, everyone wants to listen to something different. In the family of the 1960's to this was not possible, because too many kids, not room for so many big speakers, etc, etc.
2. Now, the speakers are there to carry the audio, status is derived from the size of the video screen. The screens crowded out the speakers. And you need 5 or more speakers now, which makes a set of big speakers exceptionally unfashionable.
3. Speaker size is inversely related to potential big box store volume because of the huge warehouses and sequesterd listening rooms that large speaker retailing would require. Buying without listening first makes does not fit with the idea of spending big on something that you need because your are elite afficianado.
4. The middle class is dead. In the 1960's, 1970's, or early 1980's, a 'good' stereo would cost about a month's net income for a median income worker. Today the good stereo still costs about a month's net income for a median income wroker, but the median median income worker is two weeks net pay away from homelessness or moving back in with his parents. And in that supposed golden age of stereo, the 'good' stereo was expected to last about 10 years and many of them did. Some are still working, many have been in the repair shop several times and keep going. Today, no one expects anything to outlast its warranty by much (except maybe a car), and competent repairs for anything more complicated than shoes are a not easy to come by.
That's a very pessimistic take. I recently sold a Sonos connect - about 15 years old if not older and working as well as when it was new. I have a Google home max speaker, 8 years old, works flawlessly. We have a pair of B&W speakers from 2001 or so - got the speaker insulation replaced, otherwise everything great. And a 5.1 set from Logitech from 2005 also works without issues - the difficult part is to only make sure the PC has the right outputs, but even that is moot with USB sound cards.
We also have some cheap monitor speakers, they work fine after 7 years.
The opamp back in the days were pretty terrible. NE5532 was the king of audio opamp for decades until the early 2000s.
Modern Class D are built on advanced semiconductor processes (they are considered legacy node in the eye of Hacker News's primary audience. They are at least a lot better than the early days in terms of performance in analog domain.) When an IC company spend a lot of R&D money to develop Class D amp, they for sure exhausted what they can do before they tape out. That results in the superbe performance of modern Class D amplifier.
There is still oppertunities in getting analog Class AB type of amplifier working better, such as adding motional feedback control sensor-less or with sensor. KEF recently released a motional feedback soundbar with back-EMF voltage as sensor. It sure improve the sound quality for a soundbar. Although physics is physics, one cannot make a 1 inch speaker sounds like a subwoofer, but motional feedback sure can make 10 speakder sounds like a 15 inch subwoofer.
Sound reproduction is not just a flat frequency response. Perfect reproduction of phase information generates wider 3D sound stage, without the need of DSP to fake it.
Speaker box design advanced dramatically since the 90s too. The start of it was then - Bose made a lot of noise with compact-for-the-time stuff - but it's really advanced since then. Compare the sound quality of a laptop then with a larger MacBook now. And when you can get decent sound at decent volume out of a small package a lot of people don't want to give up a ton of space for extremely-good sound at high volume.
Modern sound stuff doesnt use any dacs, its more of BLDC motor controller bolded to a speaker in a tiny box powered by DSP making it sound great and full of deep base.at any volume.
> My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s.
I think it is more like a "good enough" sound. There are still are hifi-enthusiasts, but I think most people don't see the reason to spend a fortune just to listen to music. Mostly, because people don't even know what a difference a good hifi setup brings to your life or they just don't care.
I always wanted to try building the "World's best speakers"[1] by Technical Ingredients just for fun and education, but in the end I did not care enough to spend the time and money.
40 or more years ago, the big hifi brands were racing to get total harmonic distortion down to 0.05% or less. The average person is unlikely to complain if it is 5.00%.
There was once a hifi show at which one of the most revered hifi reviewers gave a talk and played some samples for the audience. Almost all the audience noticed at once that his samples had a defect, a loud high-frequency tone somewhere around 10,000 Hz. He didn't hear it.
The concept of good enough has won. Many consumers still think that HD radio is high-definition. It is hierarchical digital, a standard developed to be good enough that most people would not complain. And, speaking of HD, lots of HD TV buyers were perfectly happy even though they were unaware that they have not got their TV producing HD pictures.
Digital music through digital systems has a lot of glorious qualities. But listening to records through my tube marantz or zenith amplifiers sounds way better to me. Tell you what, I’ll set up my Smaart rig (rational acoustics) in the room and see if I can find evidence :)
Good class Ds are not that cheap. Hypex and now Purifi based amps are good but not what I’d call cheap. Evenso lots of people like AB amps and some even like the old A amps fooling around with their “valves”.
My SMSL SA-50 sounds an order of magnitude (in price) better than my Marantz PM68 and costs an order of magnitude less - in other words, it sounds fantastic and it was cheap. Some of the early carriers of class D hype (Tripath based) were even cheaper. A good chip and a bunch of quality passives don't need to be that expensive.
So I'm more concerned about Samsung owning B&W (there is no real substitute for good speakers) than Marantz and Denon. It seems like really good amps can be made by sticking to class D chip application notes these days.
There are tons of great speakers and speaker companies, and I think B&W is very, very overrated. Check out the monitor audio gold line. I have two pairs of their floorstanding, and prefer them, unreservedly, to the b&w 702cs that I tried first.
The accepted wisdom in the audiophile community is you get what you pay for, i.e. a good implementation of any given amp topology remains a good implementation regardless of the topology. Once you get to a certain $$$ range, the sound of tube amps and transistor amps (and class D amps I might add) begins to converge.
Maybe but plenty of AB tests have shown that they can't actually hear the difference they talk about. Those who are aware of this and objective save a lot of money by buying quality - still a lot of dollars but not the most you can spend.
My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s. Now, a fair comparison would be to a modern floor speaker with modern magnets and amps, but I'm too old for this :-)