I’m considering getting new speakers. I have the Focal Aria 948 in mind. What are your thoughts about buying speakers today, that was initially released 10 years ago. I know with speakers quality matters more than technology, but there must still have been some advances in the past decade?
I guess I’d say growing acceptance of class D amplifiers, built-in DSP, and similar digital response linearization techniques are new. Especially studio monitor space is nowadays looking a lot like it’s just a computer with transducers built-in into its box.
The epitome of that design is the Genelec The Ones series which are a concentric point source technology, just completely uniform directivity whether vertical or horizontal. Completely digital inside, analog is now an afterthought and no longer preferred way to input audio to these speakers.
Figuring out how to make designs properly work where the tweeter is inside the midrange is also somewhat new, concentric drivers tend to have discontinuity and waveguide’s motion related irregularities which cause warbling or modulation distortion. But 3-way concentrics could have done that for some time.