People's ears have not changed, and the ability to reproduce sound has been nearly perfected. If you're not too picky/audiophillic, like most people, the requirements are even lower.
We've hit peak audio (best reproduction, no restrictions on usage) and it's only downhill from here.
I look forward to my 2025 speakers that only work for an hour a day unless I pay for extra time credits.
"Do you wish to play a) music b) music and local radio c) music, local radio and podcasts [BEST VALUE]?"
Modern digital technology makes this so much easier and more. There are excellent digital power amps, where you have power amplification on one chip integrated with the DAC. Just looking at some of the features of a simple Homepod, there are exciting technologies involved, which could improve also higher end audio. First is driving the bass speaker in a feedback loop. In classical audio technology, you would have a power signal and have to rely on the speaker to transfer this into motion with as little as possible of distortion. Which required the speaker to behave like a perfect spring for different frequencies. So this is a very difficult task, making the speaker expensive and often imperfect. Homepods drive their bass speakers in a feedback loop, the desired position of the membrane is calculated and an electric circuit drives it into that position. It does no longer depend on the mechanical properties of the membrane, also allowing for much higher motion range than in a classical speaker. Also, the active monitoring of the room acoustics with several directional microphones is an improvement vs. classical set up amplifiers, even if they had a microphone input for set up.
So I don't see us hitting peak audio at all yet, that makes for exciting times for music lovers.
Distortion levels from speakers are still far from negligible-- by negligible I mean so low as to be extremely likely to be inaudible.
High power amplifiers are just now reaching a point where there are efficient amplifiers with negligible distortion; though they've been pretty good for a fairly long time.
There is a lot that can be done in terms of immersive spatial audio, unfortunately the trouble and cost of installing an array of speakers ... limits deployment. :)
There is also a lot that can be done to use DSP to ameliorate poor room acoustics, this stuff exists, but it isn't super widely deployed.
Nah, there are plenty of other things, like positional audio. I remember (through a pleasant haze of nostalgia) my old A3D-based sound card in the 90s as being even better than modern EAX stuff.
Potential improvement in that area can be both through simply adding speakers, and through tuning per-speaker output to forge better audio-cues. (To wit, Head Related Transfer Functions applied to headphones, possibly even with custom parameters for different peoples' heads.)
So, nothing, at the end of the day?
It does plenty for music.
So that's not really plenty of music.
The response curve from speakers has also reflected that, a lot of them are bass boosted in the amplifier or are designed with a bass boost in them.
I have some fairly nice speakers from the 70's (a couple of different sets, one homebuilt), and Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane sound a lot better from them than Katy Perry or Tiesto.
If you want good speakers, you don't buy a device that's 50% streaming audio circuitry, you buy a same-priced speaker that's actually a good speaker.
If you look at the S/N and distortion specs on a new affordably priced receiver, they won't be meaningfully better than a mid-range unit from the late 70s/early 80s. All the new HDMI and 20.7 Dolby Surround does nothing for two-channel MP3s or CDs.
Because the performance is equal, it's allowed build quality to shine. 15kg of heatsinks, capacitors the size of Coke cans, and big old TO-3 transistors are probably going to outlast propriatery digital doodads and amp-on-a-module designs built to minimize costs.
I'm more of a JVC fanboy myself, but I've been working on a Kenwood KR-6200 recently. 45 years old and one dead bulb. Unacceptable!
I retired many computers in the 80's and 90's in perfect working order. None of them will power up today.
Nothing I've bought in the last 25 years sounds remotely as good as them.
And plugging in a Chromecast audio has given it immortality.
My current living room setup is a Chromecast Audio connected to an AVR via the optical out connection, which powers my speakers, but I'm curious if there's any alternatives. The eBay sellers are really starting to price-gouge, and I'm not naive enough to believe that my Chromecast Audio will last forever.
Btw, Snapcast works great.
Pulseaudio can stream to multiple speakers and audio devices simultaneously. Switching to JACKd instead of gstreamer for the pulseaudio backend allows for a much more powerful audio processing subsystem (at the expense of resources since jackd likes a real-time kernel). Using mpd allows for a lightweight low latency server/client to stream audio to remote destinations. It’s not quite plug and play (DLNA doesn’t care about synchronization) but dropping mpd onto a raspberry pi is the simple fix (and simulates the hardware inside of a sonos speaker)
I’m sorry I’m on mobile or i would make a diagram showing this in detail. I’ve been thinking of what an open source Sonos clone would look like for a long time. Maybe it’s time to open up that git repo to the public
The latency you think I have is not there.
Or use a Chromecast Ultra and connect to the hi-fi with a hdmi to audio (spdif, 3.5", ...) or hdmi to vga+audio (and don't bother connect the vga to anything)
A boutique outfit from Shenzhen makes that.
Yep. I picked up a massive old high-end Denon receiver with pre-amp inputs and use a cheap newer receiver to decode surround digital audio and pump it through that 40 pound beast. Sounds incredible.
Many will also support Bluetooth so you can stream to your stereo.
Just Google for 'SBC codec transparent' if curious.
Bluetooth's A2DP only real problem is the unspecified latency requirements.
Several companies make all-in-one bluetooth speakers that have amps built in, but they tend to be lower quality in my experience.