Re:AirPods Max: An Audiophile Review
by MarkusWandel on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @02:40PM
(#26005556)
The best vintage stuff certainly holds up. Decades ago, I found some speakers at a garage sale... Dynaco A25 something. Looked a bit crude. Hooked them up and... holy crap these sound good. Only later found out they're considered classics. I don't use them any more because decades of standing later caused the woofers to develop a voice coil rub, but these'll get fixed up by the right person some day and probably still used a century after they were manufactured.
Almost everything else has gotten better, or at least a lot cheaper and less trouble for comparable quality. But speakers haven't.
Mind you a lot of that old stuff was crap too.
Speakers have gotten a lot better but at some point you’re fighting physics. If you want to move a lot of air, you need mass and volume. Most of our modern systems using a fairly similar formula to speakers from the 1960s, but we have better materials and amplifiers. For example, you can use a neodymium magnet but this isn’t really a revolution in speaker technology, it just means you can make a smaller/lighter speaker.
That said, speakers have gotten a lot better since the Dynaco A-25 came out. They cost $160 for a pair in 1969, or about $1,100 in 2020 by the CPI. You can buy a pretty damn good system for $1,100.
On the headphone side, the technology has gotten massively between in the last 30 years, so all my headphones are from the 1990s or later, but for speakers, tower/cabinet speakers from the 1970s are still functional and good.
My primary set of headphones were purchased new in 2007. It's been 13 years, and they still work perfectly fine. The amplifier they're plugged into was manufactured in 1976 and has had a set of NOS Sylvania Green Hornet tubes swapped in.