> My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s

I have a hard time believing this… yes today’s small devices sound better than small devices ever did. A lot of work went into that because people appreciate the reduced footprint. Also, those speakers are super cheap in comparison to the budget people would allocate to their stereo setups in the day.

But I’ve never heard a small speaker sound better than a 1970ies or later hifi amp + speakers from a decent brand. With big speakers you can reproduce all these frequencies without physics tricks. The sound is more laid back and the soundstage fills the room.

All the recent engineering has gone into making speakers small, cheap and wireless, like in the 90ies it went into creating multi-channel audio, but I would say stereo sound quality, as used for popular music, already peaked in the 70ies / 80ies.

Of course you can still get those quality hifi components today, or even better than that, but the median household is not listening on that and I’d wager has worse sound today than was the norm in the physical media era.

The opamp back in the days were pretty terrible. NE5532 was the king of audio opamp for decades until the early 2000s.

Modern Class D are built on advanced semiconductor processes (they are considered legacy node in the eye of Hacker News's primary audience. They are at least a lot better than the early days in terms of performance in analog domain.) When an IC company spend a lot of R&D money to develop Class D amp, they for sure exhausted what they can do before they tape out. That results in the superbe performance of modern Class D amplifier.

There is still oppertunities in getting analog Class AB type of amplifier working better, such as adding motional feedback control sensor-less or with sensor. KEF recently released a motional feedback soundbar with back-EMF voltage as sensor. It sure improve the sound quality for a soundbar. Although physics is physics, one cannot make a 1 inch speaker sounds like a subwoofer, but motional feedback sure can make 10 speakder sounds like a 15 inch subwoofer.

Sound reproduction is not just a flat frequency response. Perfect reproduction of phase information generates wider 3D sound stage, without the need of DSP to fake it.

Speaker box design advanced dramatically since the 90s too. The start of it was then - Bose made a lot of noise with compact-for-the-time stuff - but it's really advanced since then. Compare the sound quality of a laptop then with a larger MacBook now. And when you can get decent sound at decent volume out of a small package a lot of people don't want to give up a ton of space for extremely-good sound at high volume.

If your Alexa d4 sounds better than your home hifi the your home hifi wasnt.

It's advancements in delta-sigma DACs during around 2005-2015. So amps. Bit depths and noise levels improved massively. It's that that solved audio.

Digital music through digital systems has a lot of glorious qualities. But listening to records through my tube marantz or zenith amplifiers sounds way better to me. Tell you what, I’ll set up my Smaart rig (rational acoustics) in the room and see if I can find evidence :)

Good class Ds are not that cheap. Hypex and now Purifi based amps are good but not what I’d call cheap. Evenso lots of people like AB amps and some even like the old A amps fooling around with their “valves”.

> and class D amplifiers are the two main things that killed "hifi" type audio

class D amplifiers is to hifi, what lung cancer is to lung. /s

> The audio business has merged with the "home theatre" business. The pursuit of audiophile quality was always a boutique/niche market.

That's not really what they meant - most people do not have "home theaters" they have a soundbar or a couple of bluetooth speakers.

> I always wondered if we could replicate the physicality of vinyl / CDs, games ROM etc. through memory cards

I kinda like the idea that the music is stored as a raw analog signal pressed or magnetically stirred onto physical media. There's no file format, no codec , no DRM and no CPU involved. It's more of a protest against the digital assault that turned a ritualistic listening experience into a effortless, passive background task.

There's also a big nostalgia factor where a lot of people like me grew up with vinyl, cassettes and CD's when they came out. High school years were rife with tape trading, DiY mixes and kids who made their own music. In HS I knew kids handing out tapes with their fresh new rap or garage grunge band. You won't get that magic back with an SD card in a cardboard facade (or spotify for that matter.)

The thing with physical media that is often missed is - it never interrupts you for an OS update, you never lose content due to lapsed subscription, artists/labels can't revoke songs, theres no controller app that can be broken by updates, you don't have to worry about your speakers aging out of firmware updates.

You just put the media in and press play.

Sure having infinite streaming libraries is cool yes, but people listen to the same stuff or slowly expand listening habits. $10-30/mo for life ends up being a lot more money than just buying what you actually enjoy and listening to radio/stream like stuff to sample new.

The streamers are slop slingers now. Ironically I have found that YouTube's recommendation engine is 100x better for me than Spotify/Apple/Tidal ever were, and I don't even pay for Youtube, lol. Or sites like Discogs for more engaged music discovery.

https://kazeta.org is doing something along those lines for games.

We do have stuff like that, here's an example for kids:

https://tonies.com

They seem quite well made, if not exactly cheap. I believe there's also a way to store your own mp3's, but I don't know how open the interface really is. Ofc you can also make sth like this from scratch.

The Yota player for kids is basically this

Really really really missing the point! Firstly I'd object to your statement that you have to buy a lot of stuff to get into it. Record players aren't expensive, and vinyl is also cheap (and don't look on ebay, go to your local thrift stores / charity shops -- or even better, your parents' house). Secondly the physicality isn't somehow the friction of associating music with a physical object, but the actual experience and sound of a record playing. You won't get this unless you do it, often, with wonderful music, so it's hard to describe.

You're right, that it is a lot of stuff. I'm looking now at 6 shelves filled with records. That definitely doesn't work for people in small apartments.

Kids these days literally have no idea how things can sound, so content is mastered for them and their el cheapo Bluetooth inears, so proper equipment (not necessarily expensive and most definitely not audiophile-tier, mind you, just something that acknowledges physics) owners get scraps and leftovers.

The large number of people complaining that the new iPhone Air only has one speaker instead of two opened my eyes to this. There are a large number of people listening to music and watching Netflix using just the built-in phone speakers. Scary.

I'll copy-paste a comment I saw on Nikon Rumors (not sure whether it's copypasta or not)

---

I drove my electric BMW the other day, blasting a simulated V8 noise from speakers. It was a cold grey murky day but no rain. I stopped by the gas station to fuel my stomach by a bag of chips and the Snickers bar, because I went without eating a breakfast that morning. I saw a lonely dog by the roadside. It looked sad. I took my digital retro-styled camera with film simulation function out of my retro Billingham bag and took a photo. A little speaker in the camera has simulated the film advance noise just like in the past. Doggo looked at me with its sad eyes and went away. I took a glimpse of a photo of a dog and pressed "film grain +2" in the menu. Lovely shot. I'll post it to the Insta, probably. Then I entered the store, bought my bag of chips and the Snickers bar and saw a vinyl record corner. Man, I love vinyl. Those digital files pressed onto tangible, tactile surface. An AI-generated woman looked at me from the record artwork. Fonts were crooked. The price was $8.99 with a discount. I knew it's a pop record right away. Though, I'd love to blast an IDM track from speakers in my electric BMW alongside with simulated V8 noise, a pop record with vocoder vocals and autotune is also good. I took a record to place the vinyl on the bookshelf in my room. I know I'll be listening to the music via Spotify anyway. Man, I love vinyl. Just like film photography, it reminds me I'm alive. I'm real.

I've gotten into vinyl in my 40s after never having owned it before. I came of age in the cassette and CD transition era and was quickly on to MP3s in my teens.

I enjoy the Vinyl & CD vibe of being fully offline.

And it's also interesting how much stuff from 90s/00s era, particularly electronic music and the various remixes never made it on to streaming platforms. I assume some of it is just complexity of licensing some niche pressing of Artist C remixing a song by Artists A&B, etc.

Sometimes I see some of the 2-3 CD live albums make it onto a streaming platform with like 1/3 of the songs greyed out missing due to licensing.

To add, as a vinyl enjoyer, it's also that putting on a record is a deliberate action. I'm putting it on with the intent to listen and enjoy it vs. most often when I open up Apple Music it's just background noise while I'm working on other things, where I just hit shuffle on my 10k song+ library. When I put on a record it's because I want to sit with it and listen to that specific album.

Plus there's the aspect of actually owning your media and not simply leasing it with a monthly subscription.

Yes, ritual is the right word. I used to do it quite a lot during COVID with cassettes and CDs while working.

Helped me to more consciously get into work mode.

...okay, but like, couldn't we choose a medium that doesn't physically wear out from repeated playback?

CDs just seem so much better. Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?

It's a less embodied experience. I prefer a knob than pressing a button for volume. And sliding on a piece of glass is a soulless UX.