As always, Blue comes in with a great technical explanation 
*EDIT* Guily, you have GOT to be trolling. I mean... you can't seriously believe the words you're saying...
Yeah I do... Just like in cars, here lot's of ppl say cars nowadays suck full of electronics, the old cars were the ones... Yeah they were... a 300hp car that almost doesn't go at 200km\h and suck 30 liters of gas for that... (And I'm also an old car enthusiastic, specially US Muscle cars). But cars nowadays thanks to new technologies, have lot more power. Hell even a 60hp car nowadays have enough power for everything, while a very old car that had 60hp, would not even be able to get in my garage which have a big inclination...
In music is just the same, and barely in everything...
expensive speakers with a huge range. Nobody I know, or anybody on this forum is at that level. Nobody has that kind of system. And if you did, you would be listening to vinyls.
I had studio quality system for more than a year here in my house off (only tested one time).
Something like this:
It had 10 or more outputs for professional type speakers (500w each), I have no idea which was the manufacter, all i know is that shit cost the price of maybe 50xZ5500 digital. But I remember well that the speakers were two JBL huge 1000w rms professional speakers, and hell they had a pretty good quality, but I still prefer the PC sound (is more my type. Sattelites+subwoofer).
But my dream is having not all range speakers like studio kind, but having lots and lot's of speakers, each playing only a certain frequency. Let's say a huge woofer for the kicks, a huge subwoofer for the rumble, a huge speaker for the mid low, a huge for the mids, a medium for the mid-high, and little for the highs. That was my dream, all lower ones made of titanium, and the higher frequency one to be a horn type, oh and a rotary subwoofer type for the very deepest rumble possible (damn it can be made nowadays, it's just a matter of having a lot of $$$$$$), but I don't think you could ever had anything like this in the old times, that was not possible.
ps: and I can't find the subwoofer that cost like 10K $ or more, since you guys say we have no built quality nowadays... this sub has lot of thecnologies in it to increase bass, even in the case design...
guily, now a days everything is mass produced, the quality is lowered in order to pump out components quicker (cheap labour, cheap parts, cheap materials) which in turn = profit. you could get a system now a days that beats older stuff but u wont find it on the shelf at ur local store, it'd be custom jobs that u pay a lot for.
easiest example is cars, compare your mass produced car to say Ferrari which only makes a small number of cars, they can afford to focus on every little detail, it costs a lot more then mass produced cars but the small numbers and attention to detail means every part is the best.
I agree with what blue said about the best stuff wont be up on billboards or tv ads.
Well the quality of cars nowadays are lot higher than older ones...
There are some good mass produced materials, which come better by robots than made by humans...
Also mass produced can be made for making cheap things, but can also be used to make expensive things...
And the expensive high quality things compared to the expensive old high quality things, you can't even compare...
Boards are better, solder are better and take lot more heat, condensers improved a billion times, every component has improved over the years... transistors, resistances............
ps: Nowadays there are simple lots and lot's of cheap things that we never had before, creative is one of those, but their best speaker system has a good quality and have like 600w RMS and cost here around 500€ which is already expensive. But ofcourse their 50€ 2.1 systems, have all pretty bad components... (50€ = 10 contos of my old currency, and with 10 contos all you could buy "HERE" was probably just the cables in the 80's)...
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OH other things, 4 example in the cars, ppl always think old cars were lot safer since they were all hard metal... actually that's wrong. There's in the youtube a car crash against a huge and heavy old car (I think a chevy) against a crappy cheap car of nowadays, and the old car kinda broke into pices and would have killed everyone inside, while the new car, dind't take that much danger and everyone would probably survive.
ps: that was just a myth (unless compared against a chine model car, cause their crash tests are pretty.... BAD)...
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Well written post. I have a lot of reasons to not have FLAC on my desktop, mainly having to download all of my music over again, but 10x larger. It would be a nightmare. 
