Tech That Flopped!

I think mass market appeal in technology and success is not always an indication of quality or even good sound. Magnepan comes to mind. Planar speakers are not mass market success products but they have held their own for many years and to many people.... sound fantastic. Horn speakers are still around and have many, many fans. The low power matching to tube amps produce, to a great many audiophiles, enduring great sound. In another audio technology, what about record albums? Is that an enduring mass market technology? I guess so but they were in danger of fading out of mass market favor.
The best technology does not always succeed, but perhaps the successful marketing pushes technology into favor among the masses. I think really good technology will prevail, as a general rules, even if it has to wait to be accepted. It will need some successful marketing/advertising though....

That’s what I was trying to say Doug.

One reason that there are not more time-aligned speakers is that there are not many designers (one?) left alive that can master the technological challenges of successfully implementing the first-order crossover in a real-world, full range loudspeaker, although it is a simpler crossover at a basic level. Drivers have to exceed "typical performance" in reproducing cleanly and accurately outside of the standard frequency range limitations for each size/type.

Another is that it is expensive to do this well and recent threads here show that a big chunk of today’s marketplace prefers good/very good sound at a (relatively) low price as their primary buying criteria. Makes sense yet (smart?) compromises are made to keep prices low. Hard to overcome that reality despite the promise of other more expensive designs, regardless of their merit.

Dave

Sorry Teo, but if you post something you clearly don't know much about you may get a response from somebody who does know about it, and thus you learn something. You're welcome.

Success in terms of popularity often means mediocrity in terms of performance.

I agree 100%. Best example I can think of is the MP3 format.  Further, just because a product design caters to a niche market, it does not make it a flop, this is so strange to me. Porsche made a rear-engined car, vast majority of cars have engines in the front, so Porsche tech must be a flop!

In related news, in science, as of today:

"Quantum theory has many strange features compared to classical theory," Richens told Phys.org. "Traditionally we study how the classical world emerges from the quantum, but we set out to reverse this reasoning to see how the classical world shapes the quantum.

........

The take-away is that all possible statements, theories and seeming rules of all objective scientific analysis all contain quantum entanglement. .... Which... means that objectivity is a fail.

That objectivity is not universal but in a localized bubble and outside of that, is, well, a pipe dream a forced projection, a non thing, in the overall analysis. A cute experiment and it can’t and does not exist. Subjectivity is illustrated by the same dominoes falling, to rule the roost in all facets.

"Objectivity is a fail" and "subjectivity will rule the roost in all facets" seem to be very objective statements. The assertion that ’everything is so complex that all interactions are too intricate for us to even begin to understand’ only opens the door that nothing we see or hear is real. So everything we think we know is in quicksand; not sure how that helps the discussion.