Huge mono speakers used to be mounted in walls. When people started making sealed boxes, any half-competent carpenter could whip up an enclosure. Many speaker companies originated in garages. Wood, mdf, etc., remains easily to work with, so long as you like flat surfaces.
What would be REALLY interesting would be to test a speaker in two incarnations: identical drivers, identical crossover, identical configuration, identical baffle size, identical internal volume, only different is one cabinet is made of mdf and the other of, say, aluminum. Now that would make for some interesting comparative listening.
