Recently, I got new speakers and when I hooked them up, a/b tested against my old speakers, and heard tighter, punchier, deeper bass, more clarity and detail, I confidently told myself that the new thing is better, but over time I noticed that I was just not listening to music that much. Listening to my favorite albums or checking out a new one for the first time used to hold my attention, but now after a few songs, I would drift off down a YouTube rabbit hole and can’t get through an entire album. I put my old (apparently inferior) speakers back and I suddenly can’t get enough music.
I’m not going to go into over-analyzing those particular speakers, because I have had the same thing happen with headphones and amps as well. I think my takeaway here Is that in my time watching reviews and trying to judge what good sound is, I have inadvertently trained my self to look for certain characteristics of sound quality that aren’t actually what I enjoy the most… so how do you know what it is about sound quality actually keeps you listening as opposed to what checks the boxes you’ve created to distinguish “good” audio quality.
Timely question for me, just went to Capital AudioFest with over a 100 hotel rooms set up as listening stations with really high end gear, heard a lot of speakers in the $10,000 to $75,000 range. The sound is generally crisp but mostly based on 8” or smaller speakers (or electro static or magnetic or such). My 50 year old speakers use 12” woofers and outperform, to my ear, most of this new technology.
Then I heard a new speaker by Clayton Shaw that uses 2 12” woofers in each speaker plus a tweeter that are set in a plank, no box. They cost about $3,000 for a pair and sounded far better to me than anything else at the show. Made clear to me what I had suspected, that building these narrow boxes with small drivers just can’t provide a decent soundstage.