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[Steve Loewenthal]

As a non-professional, I think of professional as anything that a (reputable) professional sound company would keep in their inventory. 10 to 15 years ago (I lose track of time as I get older) the lowest quality speaker in one of the professional sound companies in our local area was the QSC HPR boxes. Everything else they used was higher quality / higher $.
I would speculate that many of the speakers mentioned in the OP are used by reputable professional sound companies at events and tasks for which they are appropriate.

[Scott Holtzman]

To be pro the product needs to be built to be maintainable over a period of probably 20 years.

The product needs to be part of a full ecosystem for transport and deployment.

Technical data needs to be provided to allow the performance to be modelled.

Notice that Lyle's points are not sonically skewed.  "The sound" becomes a lower driver on the value matrix.

[Robert Lunceford]

To be pro the product needs to be built to be maintainable over a period of probably 20 years.

The product needs to be part of a full ecosystem for transport and deployment.

Technical data needs to be provided to allow the performance to be modelled.

I believe the Bose 802 met all the above criteria.

[Roland Clarke]

It’s a crazy time, when MI products can often perform as well or better than some pro level products.  I personally think that build quality, ruggedness is often more the differentiating factor, hence price.  That’s not to say boxes like srx and dsr aren’t great for the money, but I’ve seen bits come loose inside both these brands and I kind of accept this.  If it were d&b, KV2, Danley, L’Acoustic, JBL Pro, et al, we would be ringing the rep.  I can’t count how many pieces of pretty mediocre crap was toured on the basis it didn’t break much.

[Luke Geis]

I had a response typed last night and I thought I hit post, but apparently not.....

The long and short of it was that, like all things, there is a 1% club. To me, the differentiation between Pro-level gear and Touring Class gear is just that. MI grade is entry level, Pro-level is the next obvious evolution and Touring Class is the stuff used by the 1% club. I would will a bet that the true overall difference between the Pro-level and Touring class stuff is 5%. The last little bit is exponential in cost but marginal in actual performance improvement. We, of course, know it is not cheap to be on the cutting edge. The epitome of quality and performance has no price tag unless it is a wooden box with simple electromagnetic devices in it.

I don't feel that we will ever see a product made to last 20 years anymore. I can see 10-15 years being possible, but honestly feel that even the best option available that just released today, will not be serviceable or even relevant in 20 years. I hypothesize that in 20 years we will have speaker systems that have built-in boundary detection, automatic DSP ( for beam steering and cancellation ) and motorized speaker element alignment that will allow us to simply throw the speaker/s in the sky and it will do the rest for us. I also think we will have truly wireless mixers that control the stage box and can run off of batteries if need be. I think the XLR will be phased out completely in favor of a purely networked audio format that has power and signal in a single cable run utilizing a proprietary connector. Heck, we may even have speakers that are no longer pistonic in nature, are scalable and modular, allowing a speaker to be erected in any size needed. The possibilities are endless! The days of speakers that people use for 20 years is over.

The effects are already starting to show. 10 years ago you couldn't buy a line array without spending nearly $10,000 per element. Today you can buy real units that are very acceptable in operation and quality for less than $2,000 per element. In another 5-10 years, that same technology and performance will only cost you $1,000 per element. The current 1% club products will continue to advance and continue to cost multitudes more until we finally reach universal consciousness and the experience of music and sound can be enjoyed without even needing a sound system at all. Universal consciousness will be the point where a band can play and whoever wants to tune in can hear it however they desire and be present to the experience without even physically being there. They say the first person that will live to be 1,000 years of age is already alive today. If that is true, then there is truly is no limit to what we can do with sound.

[Robert Lunceford]

I think that Community has hit the nail on the head with their philosophy for making speakers.
1. Speaker must make sound.
2. Speaker must make good sound.
3. Speaker must continue to make good sound.

[Noah D Mitchell]

...will continue to advance and continue to cost multitudes more until we finally reach universal consciousness and the experience of music and sound can be enjoyed without even needing a sound system at all. Universal consciousness will be the point where a band can play and whoever wants to tune in can hear it however they desire and be present to the experience without even physically being there. They say the first person that will live to be 1,000 years of age is already alive today. If that is true, then there is truly is no limit to what we can do with sound.

What kind of coffee do you drink in the morning?

[James Paul]

Universal consciousness will be the point where a band can play and whoever wants to tune in can hear it however they desire and be present to the experience without even physically being there. If that is true, then there is truly is no limit to what we can do with sound.

If that is true, could cure G.A.S.
Now, how to monetize.

[Don T. Williams]

The future may already be here.  L-acoustics Lisa and d&b's Soundscape are hear and touring!  Pretty impressive technology that really does improve the sound of live events - maybe of all sizes.

[Luke Geis]

Not a coffee guy really. I think by the time universal consciousness is a reality, money won't be a thing anymore.

I like to ponder the what ifs and the future of our existence. I was busy postulating how to do multichannel wireless audio right about the time the first digital mixers came to be commercially available. While I now realize that is no longer a needed reality, I think mostly of problem solving devices and tools to improve what we already have.

One of my more recent ideas was about guitar cabinet design. Guitarists are on a craze for smaller more potent rigs. We have been making guitar speaker cabinets the same way for nearly 60-70 years. So I wonder about making horn loaded and or phase coherent designs that outperform the current standard in every way and still allow for conventional micing techniques.

My most recent thought was about stage snake drops. We have networked audio that connects a mixer to a stage box and then we use analog snakes to route signal around the stage. Why haven't we just made networked drop boxes? A single brain with X number of network connections handles all the traffic while each drop box can have say 8 in and 4 outs, or a series of options like 16 in 8 out, or 12 in 4 out; whatever. We don't typically need more than 4 drop snakes for even a fairly busy stage and we need power at each location anyway, so why bother with an analog drop snake. I'm thinking of say a network switch/brain that connects between the mixer and however many stage boxes you need. Each box has an address that can be assigned and you can put #1 at the drums, #2 by the bass and guitars, #3 by the keyboards and #4 goes to the front for vocals or whatever. Then you patch at the mixer how you need it. You can have redundancy and daisy chain the stage boxes. You can use custom and readily available lengths of network cable and for fixed installation, you can even make the in-floor boxes so the connections are really safe. No more big heavy snakes and snakeheads, less copper to carry around and no need for a splitter anymore if you go with a monitor/FOH/ that can utilize Dante or AES50.

Just thoughts that pop in and out of my head.

[ProSoundWeb Community]