Ok, no one needs another alarmist thread with someone whining about the big bad corporate system choosing cost over quality.
However I would like to bring another point, which seems to be more about the advent of new technologies in relation to the above stated. And this would be
miniaturisation and it's direct (good) consequence,
energy consumption.
These two are the predicted aspects to watch and focus on when discussing about progress in analogue or digital design. The third usually is ease of manufacturing but this is usually related to business policies.
Now, the history gives us many well known examples about this fact. Transistors taking over tubes, IC's taking over transistors, Digital taking over Analogue.
Was this correlated with an improved quality? In most cases yes. In our audio related case was mainly about S/N ratio. Every new technology lowered the threshold a little.
However, and this is the main issue I'd like to point out to, every new change in technology seems to almost exclude all the technological gains of the previous ones. Of course topologies usually are preserved but always misapplied. But except S/N, power saving features and usualy the capacity of pumping more power in the loudspeakers, nothing else was gained: no better THD figures, but usually odd harmonics uglier ones, no better rejection of weird artefacts coming from the PSU, but usually more weirdness from multiple stages and hall of mirrors effects induced by feedback.
Let me give you some examples: triodes are the most linear voltage amplifier devices. No other device can achieve this, except jfets in some conditions. Passive PSU's are less prone to weird HF artefacts than their switching mode counterparts, R2R dacs are thought to be more musical than the sigma modulated ones (although this maybe changed as the DAC industry is pushed by the studio pro industry).
Furthermore, everything shrinks, and becomes more energy friendly driven by the trend in IT. You can't have a 20W class A amplifier consuming more than a PC and looking larger and bulkier than an ATX case. You can't have a fridge size loudspeaker when all your music sits on a 3.5" HDD. And so on.
And the current state is this one: we have no more valves (and valve labs and fabs), the ss devices still can't be as good in some applications (even with the work of some great engineers like Mr. Pass and many others trying to minimise the gap). But leave the valves. When have you last heard of a new transistor release? Be it mosfet or bjt, not to mentione jfets which seems critical in some applications. All we have are op-amps, which indeed evolve and tend to be the building blocks in amplifier design. But even these are being side-stepped by digital technology, with it's new set of problems.
So you will say that's perfectly normal, every technologies brings some problems which nevertheless gets resolved over time. Maybe, but there is always a loss in quality. And a loss in the knowledge of achieving that quality. And furthermore, if untill now we where able to tweak something it will be increasingley harder to do this. Probably in a few years we will buy NOS mosfets and bjt's as some small signal jfets already are being NOS. In a few more years the analogue will finaly give upt to digital and we will say goodbye to analogue IC's (think at this: NOS opa2604
) . The audio chain will be something like an integrated codec followed by an power digital IC. We'll probably only get to tweak the PSU
.
Is this a good thing? Don;t know, maybe I'm resisting change. But it's a pity that some technologies just die before being used to their full potential.
The death of Hi-Fi
) . The audio chain will be something like an integrated codec followed by an power digital IC. We'll probably only get to tweak the PSU 
) appear to be leading the way back into the light.
