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

@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. 

And we are still infinitely far from fully mastering the fire, whatever this means.

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.

kosst agree that we may just be copying much of what came before with slight improvements and innovations with time and agree this could go as far back as fires discovery or farther. The reason that I point to the 1930s is that most of what we use today in loudspeakers was created in a  early spurt of innovation driven by early theater and telephone technology.. Might be  the telephones popularity and theaters going from silent to talkies that stimulated so much innovation but also at the time the largest corporations in the world put massive resources into creating it. This new technology also attracted some of the great minds at the time. Today audio technology design is of extremely low priority and is mostly done digitally. And is no longer attracting the best and brightest. I understand that being engaged by music is a fading activity and I really shouldn't be surprised by the lack of innovation and small time nature of companies that market such. We are a niche. 

shadorne    Horns have lower distortion than conventional drivers faster transient response than conventional drivers,are easier for amplifiers to drive can produce higher SPL than conventional drivers also exhibit greater dynamic range. and radiation pattern control. Consider much of the music that audiophiles collect was mastered on Altec, TAD, RCA and other horn systems. And many modern studios are still using horn monitors.