I never considered that, but I can totally see major discounts in pre-HD era equipment. Has there not been a lot of gains (like going from 420P to 4k) in the audio-side of things in that past 10 or 20 years? If not, can I use that same reasoning and buy some top shelf old speakers? I've always wanted to do it but I didn't want to be ripped off.

Uncompressed digital audio hit the limits of human perception around the turn of the century. The big things affecting people’s perceived quality were bad compression, noise due to things like poor shielding on low-end computers, or using something like Bluetooth where bandwidth constraints forced heavy compression. If you get a decent DAC (which isn’t a ton of money - USB devices are quite mature) a 20-30 year old system is going to sound great. Newer ones might be smaller or use less power but sound reproduction has been mature for many decades.

not too sure what you mean by uncompressed because digital audio is always lossy by its very nature

All recordings have loss, nothing unique about digital in that regard. The point I was making was simply that once CD quality (16-bit, 44hz) became mainstream and only modestly more expensive hardware could get into 24-bit / 96khz range you were past the point where almost anyone – even trained “golden ears” listeners — could notice a difference from further improvements in that regard. Given real-world limits, the threshold was lower for most people.

The reason I mentioned compression is because you’d find people who’d say digital recordings didn’t sound good but misattributed why: the problem wasn’t digital, it was either low-quality codec implementations, constricted bit-rates[1], or technical flaws like the MP3 format’s inability to precisely handle sharp attack sounds like cymbals. If you did an A/B test with those, yes, people would notice a difference but the same was true of uncompressed audio or compression using newer codecs.

1. e.g. pre-VoLTE cell phone audio sounded terrible on most carriers unless you edited your phone’s settings to increase the bitrate, because the carriers were trying to fit more customers onto each cell tower. A little more bandwidth and it sounded much closer to landline calls.

It's true due to sampling, but anyway nowadays all music source is digital so can't be a problem.

Sampling only limits the highest possible frequency, it doesn't quantize over time like a lot of people expect it to. Unless frequencies above 22khz are somehow an integral part of your listening experience you can use 44khz and suffer no ill effects.

Anyone talking about sampling and showing you a graph with stair steps is misleading. No DAC would be able to produce such a perfect stair step in the first place, let alone be tuned to do so on purpose.

There was no major change in the speaker itself for a long while - a top of the line speaker from the 80 is probably still good... if the material aged well. The elasticity of the membrane probably suffered more than anything else for example. That’s why modern speaker still cost a lot.

My take on this: Some advances, but nothing that noticeable for large or medium-sized home speakers, compared to other advances.

Related story: until not long ago I used some inherited 70s Kef HiFi speakers with a cheap modernish amp, and they sounded lovely, even against more modern equivalents (which I also had).

A mid-70s TV, though...

I’ve wondered about this for a while after hearing an impressive setup visiting someone’s house using mostly equipment from the 90s.

Are there any particular brands or models to look for?

Honestly, the short answer is to google model numbers and look at discussions on sites like Audiokarma.

The TLDR is that most Japanese "name brands you've heard of" from the 1970s are pretty good. After the mid 1980s, the build quality starts to nosedive. Top-of-range models are often still impressive, but more of the BOM cost ends up on things like decoding defunct Surround Sound formats and rear-channel amplification. This often corresponds with the change from silver-alumiuum faceplates to black plastic, and the expression "Black Plastic C*p".

Speakers are a lot more subjective and also more subject to material degredation-- the foam ring that attaches the speaker cones to the casing can go brittle or crack or fall apart. This can be fixed with rebuild kits for many models, but this is a situation where new kit has some benefits with improved materials science.