> 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.

How big of a speaker, though?

In the 80s and 90s the world moved to 6.5-or-less bookshelves which generally struggle with bass compared to a lot of modern smaller stuff. Meanwhile a lot of music started using low bass a lot more.

People asociate the non linearity distortion of bad amplifiers as pleasant.

What sounds good for a consumer may not work for profesionals who want pristine converters.