Especially in the case of amplifiers, I don't see any evidence that they've gotten worse. Linear amp sound quality plateaued decades ago, insofar as you don't even need to spend a lot of money to get an objectively excellent amplifier.
It is easier to make a low distortion amplifier than a low distortion speaker.
So true! That's exactly why I advise people to invest more on better speakers than on a better amp/receiver when building a hi-fi or home theater system. (My own system is a ratio of about 3:1. Bowers and Wilkins speakers — from when they were still made in England — and a Denon receiver.)
I consider the amplifier side trivial yet many manufacturers still get it wrong. Speakers can be more of a manufacturing problem with a wide distribution of driver characteristics and nobody wants to manufacturer adjustable tuned enclosures.
Well, for sure if you buy any kind of standalone home theater receiver (i.e. not a HTIB), you're going to have a proper amplifier and decent DACs. I don't think there's anyone screwing those up.
In general, I don't think amps are an area of particular concern any more. The technology to make low-distortion, well-behaved amps is well known at this point.
Speakers are much harder, being electromechanical devices. But any quality manufacturer will have good enough manufacturing tolerances to keep the specs pretty well controlled.
What I think has happened is that the smaller speakers of today (in little stereos, bluetooth speakers, soundbars, etc) are good enough for most people that they don't see a problem, and don't seek out anything better.
Of course, we also know that sound quality is learned to a significant extent, in that you can learn to listen for it. And most people simply do not listen for sound quality. (How, I don't know; to me, bad sound is distracting.)
They are only good enough now because recorded music quality declined. What people learned is that most modern recorded music sounds just as bad on good speakers as poor speakers.
I don't think that's true any more now than 30 years ago. That was before the loudness wars, and still most people didn't have a proper hi-fi at home, just often a boombox, and the mono speaker in their TV. Sure, good gear was available, but the mainstream was well established as buying cheaper stuff.
I do think there's a chance that you have a bit of
rosy retrospection going on, in that I think you are forgetting how much awful audio gear was also made in the past. It's just that the bad stuff we forget about, and the good we remember fondly. How much music was listened to in the 50s and 60s on horrible transistor radios and car stereos? How much music was listened to in the 80s on poorly mass-duplicated cheap cassettes, played back on cheap tape players with awful pack-in headphones? How much music was played back on budget turntables whose high tracking weight chewed up the vinyl? Yes, great equipment was available then, but it wasn't cheap, and most people didn't have it.
For sure, a given technology might go through a golden era. (For example, how cassette technology peaked probably around 1990-94ish, both in the decks and the tapes. The top gear and tapes then were
amazing. But most people never got to experience it, since they couldn't afford it and instead bought a basic model and the cheaper tapes. I was actually looking at my tape collection last night, and it struck me how, in retrospect, I bought really good tapes back when I was an avid tape user. I was buying way better tapes than most 14 year olds would have, I suspect!)
But this doesn't mean that all gear has gone downhill. For the same money — or less — than you would have paid 20 years ago, you can set up a fantastic audio system with components whose sound quality match or exceed everything you could have gotten before. It's not as though quality gear has become altogether unavailable, other than players for obsolete media. (Then you're better off with used players from their respective golden era.) Any standalone receiver will have great amps and an excellent DAC, and beyond that you choose the best speakers you can afford, and some kind of source device for playing your audio files.
Audio compression (not data compression) does have its place in noisy environments where excessive dynamic range is a problem like an automobile but instead it is used everywhere for marketing purposes.
You don't need to convince me about compression/loudness wars, I'm 100% behind you!!
What amazes me is that that crap happens
after production. So the producers create a nice, balanced mix, and then some pissant in the mastering studio fucks it up for distribution.
A good example I noticed in the past few years is Katy Perry's "Firework". The album version is
awful: it's been mangled to the point that there is distortion that sounds like straight-up clipping. (It's so obvious to me as to be distracting.) But if you go on YouTube and watch the music video, it's a perfectly clean mix, no distortion, no clipping. (And of course it'd sound better still without YouTube's aggressive [digital] compression.)
The first time I really noticed this was watching the movie Aliens at home and then later at a friend's house. At a friend's house the dropship scene was just loud and difficult to listen to. At home, the dropship scene shook the house without being loud and everything was clear.
On a sound bar or something?
I cannot stand in-ear anything and the ones I have tested did not sound as good as the OA-4s that I had.
Well, without knowing the sound of the OA-4, I can't relate to it, but there's HUGE differences between in-ear models. Most, especially budget models, are tuned to be boomy, and are unlistenable to me. But nonetheless, there are very nice models at every price point.
My current favorite in-ear is the Etymotic ER4XR, which are just gorgeous to listen to. Just transparent and effortless. (And pricey.) They are almost as good as my best headphones, the Beyerdynamic MMX300 (which is the DT770 with a boom mike added), which is truly transparent and effortless. They just sound natural from the first note, unlike essentially every other headphone or earphone I've ever listened to, which all color the sound a tiny tiny bit, to which my ears must acclimate for a moment. The MMX300 is instantly natural, and the ER4XR takes but a short moment. (Same for my ATH-M50x.)
My second-favorite in-ear earbuds are the very under-appreciated Apple In-Ear Earphones (not the EarPods!), which punch far, far above their $80 price in terms of sound. Unfortunately, they're just not durable — I never got more than a year out of them, and I'm really, really careful with my stuff!
And one thing to remember about in-ear earbuds, especially ones like the Etymotic, is that they MUST be fitted properly. If they do not form a proper seal in the ear canal, with the sound vent in the correct place, the sound will be terrible. The Ety's, in all fairness, take getting used to — one German magazine reviewer remarked that to get the proper seal, it feels like you must insert them deep enough to tickle your nostrils from behind! (In actuality, one can better regard them as highly effective earplugs that happen to be equipped with tiny speakers.)
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