2. speakers
  3. 125362-293

Loudspeakers have we really made that much progress since the 1930s?

Since I have a slight grasp on the history or loudspeaker design. And what is possible with modern. I do wonder if we have really made that much progress. I have access to some of the most modern transducers and design equipment. I also have  large collection of vintage.  I tend to spend the most time listening to my 1930 Shearer horns. For they do most things a good bit better than even the most advanced loudspeakers available. And I am not the only one to think so I have had a good num of designers retailers etc give them a listen. Sure weak points of the past are audible. These designs were meant to cover frequency ranges at the time. So adding a tweeter moves them up to modern performance. To me the tweeter has shown the most advancement in transducers but not so much the rest. Sure things are smaller but they really do not sound close to the Shearer.  http://www.audioheritage.org/html/profiles/lmco/shearer.htm
johnk
johnk's avatar
johnk OP
1,490 posts
 
koksst_amojan I cant answer a non sequitur. Threads about progress in loudspeaker design since the 1930s and maybe a lack of innovation or similarity of design in such things. 

johnk's avatar
johnk OP
1,490 posts
 
larryi, Glad CAR exists and its a great option but there product in no way obsoletes vintage and I find it a bit funny that CAR was used as a example of advanced modern design since much of what they offer is cool modernized vintage design. And that would support my orignal assumption of how little progress has been made since the 1930s.
kosst_amojan
2,095 posts
 
@johnk 
You have and extremely weird idea of innovation. Practically nothing that exists today is the result of a genuinely new idea. If you really want to take the concept of technological evolution to it's extreme, it's completely accurate to say all you're hearing is mankind's mastery of fire. There's nothing all that new about the internal combustion engine. We just figured out how to put fire in a can. There's practically no genuinely new ideas that gave rise to the speaker. The only real innovation was a means of more accurately controlling the input of energy into a system. Pretty much the rest is minor adaptations from technologies hundreds of years old. So I guess I'm failing to see why you point to the 1930's as some paradigm of innovation. 
inna
5,245 posts
 
And we are still infinitely far from fully mastering the fire, whatever this means.
shadorne's avatar
shadorne
7,333 posts
 
I thought we got past the limitations of horns about 35 years ago  - once transistor amplifiers became of good quality and allowed more power to be widely available.

Horns are simply not the best in terms of accuracy but they do deliver exceptional SPL for little power - great for live music sound reinforcement.
More to discover