[Arny Krueger]

"Audio Empire" wrote in message


We all assume that today's new equipment is so much
better than yesterday's.

In general, it is.

New materials, improved
technology, better components; all conspire to give us
levels of performance unheard of a generation ago.

Not only that, but we get that performance in a far more convenient package
and for far less money.

Certainly that's true with speakers, today's CD players
certainly outperform those of the mid '80's,

I guess you're not keeping up. CD players are now obsolete artifacts of a
decade or more back. Aside from overpriced high end audio jewelry, you can
barely even buy new CD players any more.

Today's
phono cartridges are better than those of vinyl's heyday,

Actually not, since the best of them are virtually unchanged technology-wise
from the days of vinyl.


as are arms, and to a certain extent, turntables.

No.

But what about electronics? Of course they're better, they
just have to be.

The basic design principles of audio are completely changed. The canonical
design for a modern piece of signal processing audio gear is a computer with
some DACs wrapped around it. Active filters have long been supplanted by
DSPs. FM radios are now based on a wideband RF stage that drives a digital
converter and the rest of the unit runs in the digital domain. More audio is
being distributed via general purpose digital networks (IOW, the internet)
than on physical media. Power amps don't have heavy power transformers or
output transformers any more. Hyper-clean watts are cheap. High powered,
low efficiency speakers that sacrifice efficiency for size are the way
things are now being done. A huge fraction of all music listening is being
done via earphones and headphones that completely bypass the old school
world of rooms and speakers.

Special purpose audio media is simply going away. Even hard drives are being
replaced with flash or network downloads. This is true for both audio and
video.


Better circuits, better capacitors,
better resistors, modern output devices etc. Well, I had
that smug conviction badly shaken recently.

Wrong again. In a world of signal processing computers and DSPs, capacitors
and resistors are vanishing from signal paths. For example even the
coupling capacitors on headphone amps are being replaced with
servo-reference voltage sources because the size and performance of coupling
capacitors need not be tolerated.