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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

Tangential: is it just me or speakers made a huge leap forward over the last 20 years? I mean for given price range. Laptop speakers, headphone speakers, car speakers, any minisystem/potrable stereo speakers. Was there some prominent techonolgical improvement or just a miriad of small improvements?

Also RIP to mister Koss.

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I suspect a lot of the improvements have come from advancements in simulation fidelity and optimization techniques. The raw amount of computing power for computational fluid dynamics has gone up orders of magnitude, and there's been a lot of improvements in machine learning over the last 10 years. 20 years ago, it was still very much an art of designing a shape, fabricating it, trying it, then refining it. Nowadays a lot of that refinement can be done virtually. Not that someone at Boss or whatever is an ML expert, but the person that wrote their CAD tools might have been.

Also, there has been recent emphasis on rather aggressive software based automatic/factory equalization and optimization for human perception rather than flatness. That's an incremental improvement, but like smartphone camera photos, it can really elevate the experience.

Yes. It's not just fancy magnets, but that helps. The industry got much better at modeling and designing dynamic speakers about 20 years ago. Low cost IC amplifiers also got a lot better in the last twenty years, and anything decent that's fully integrated (i.e. name brand connected speaker devices, airpods, the speaker in your phone, etc) is going to have shockingly good DSP equalization by the standards of even 2005-2010.

I don't know about headphones per headphones, though. All the audiophile-approved headphones I have around here sound much better than my airpods and my Bose noise canceling things for travel, and they're all 20+ year old designs. That includes the Koss Porta Pro (back on topic!), by the way, which I like a lot better than anything I've listened to that cost less than an approximate order of magnitude more. There certainly seems to be a market for headphones that cost more than a pair of Sennheiser 650s these days though.

On the value side, I totally agree. Early 2000 offerings were just... sad, partly due to the over-digitalization (I own a Marantz from that time, which forces many optimizations, Dolby support and similar, but in the end sounds considerably worse than its cheaper predecessors).

For how I see it, in the last year there has been a huge increase of sound quality over price, probably partly due to the growing Chi-Fi competition (especially on headphones).

I bought some sad Sennheiser IEMs in 2015 for around €160, and in 2022 they sound like garbage compared to some €40 offerings from China IEM brands (KZ, TRN, ... whatever).

Also, awareness of Bluetooth and wireless sound quality has thankfully brought to something beyond extremely expensive devices that just sounded like excessive DSP and compression.

Neodymium magnets helped to make them more powerful wrt size, and I suspect newer materials also made easier building small full range speakers where one would have needed at least separate woofer and tweeter, which wasn't convenient in cheap devices. The membranes of many small speakers from portable devices look like they're made of two concentric sections having different consistency and optimized for higher and lower frequencies, so that the same speaker can reproduce a much larger spectrum. That's probably far from being anything audiophile, still much much better than the quality of any similarly priced speaker from say the 80s.

Yes, they did. What used to be considered very expensive state-of-the-art architecture is now pretty much universal: each driver with their own amplifier and electronic crossovers. The perfection of h-bridge amplification has been a major leap forward.

Hadn't noticed before but speakers haven't suffered the same fate as other tech where additions and improvements of tangential aspects haven't affected the core performance. A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power. Your new printer might have Wi-Fi and bluetooth, but jams and leaks too often and probably has increasingly restrictive cartridge DRM.

A typical $30 bluetooth speaker has great battery life, is portable, usually rugged and often visually well designed too, and still sound as nice or nicer than I (non-audiophile) would expect from such a versatile budget device.

> A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power.

I don't know if I can agree with that. An M1 MacBook Air costs less than a thousand bucks and has more CPU power than anything that was on the market, mobile or not, before 2020.

I bought a $400 laptop in 2011. Trying to upgrade it in the years after for something at the same price point was an exercise in frustration - when almost every new mobile Intel CPU ended with a "U" and had the computation reduction that came with that.

I think you're fooling yourself. A characteristic 2011 mobile part would have been something like a Core i3-2350M, and a very comparable more recent part would have been the i3-8121U. They both had similar prices at launch, same core and thread count, but the later U-series processor is 2-4x faster depending on application and uses less than half the power.

The 2011 laptop was similar to that (i5-2410M) but the one you cite is from 2018. From 2012-2015 browsing for laptop deals to find an equivalent laptop for the same price point wasn't possible, never mind an improvement - I was worried about what to do if mine broke.

And yes the CPUs saw improvements at the same component cost, but actually finding a real laptop with even an equivalent CPU inside at the budget end wasn't possible. The laptops got features in some places, but at a cut processor cost. I'm talking about the lower end of the market (the M1 you mentioned is way way wayyy above there) for people who can afford the bare minimum. As you go up in price you get more options, but the low end was noticeably more difficult to purchase in if you weren't looking for the newer features and just wanted the same benchmarks.

My guess would be neodymium magnets.

It depends: I think the advent of MP3 pushed the concept of psychoacoustics* into the spotlight and the smartphone "revolution" made it mainstream.

Therefore speakers just sound like they would sound good without being physically "better". But for example your average smartphone is just one update away from sounding like crap.

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