Materials to reduce sidewall flex & vibration ?


I am wishing to reduce sidewall vibration without adding reinforcement 
within the cabinet. I'm curious about fiberglass and other products that can attach/bond 
permanently to the sides yielding the highest stiffness to weight ratio.
ptss

Showing 7 responses by bdp24

Yeah, the edges of the added outside panels should be chamfered away from the baffle.

Yeah, the extra panels attached to the outside of the enclosure. For the interior, an alternative to wooden dowels is threaded steel rods, inserted into the enclosure through holes drilled into opposing enclosure walls, each rod screwed into opposite ends of a threaded coupler. The rods can be adjusted until they are tight enough to prevent outward panel movement. A locking nut can be threaded onto each rod, tightened right up against the wall interiors, thereby preventing inward panel movement. The rods can span the height, width, and depth of the enclosure, one set for each pair of opposing panels.

When I built my 4 cu.ft. sub enclosures, I built them double-walled, an enclosure-within-an-enclosure. I left 1/2" space between the two, maintaining the space with 1/2" "ribs". I then filled the space with #60 Silica sand. VERY effective wall damping! There were very large loudspeaker enclosures so designed and built in the 1950/60's, before Acoustic Research's introduction of the acoustic suspension principle killed them off.

meerzistar is correct. Doubled wall panels and internal bracing is the best, most effective way to combat enclosure resonance. The sound produced inside the enclosure makes it expand, like a balloon being inflated. Bracing prohibits the enclosure walls from flexing outward in response to the internal pressure created by the drivers moving inward. And doubled panels stiffens the enclosure walls, reducing their ability to flex and thereby create sound.
Heavy paving stones have long been placed on top of subwoofer cabinets by owners, as have bags of sand or lead shot.
If appearance is not a concern, a C clamp attached to each pair of opposing walls. One top-to-bottom, one left-to-right on the upper half and another on the bottom half, and one front-to-back, between drivers. Kind of drastic, but it would certainly reinforce the enclosure and prevent flexing of the enclosure’s panels, It would also simultaneously raise the resonant frequency of each panel and the enclosure as a whole.
Hard floor tiles! The thicker, heavier type without self-stick bottoms. They add mass, which lowers the cabinets resonant frequencies, and damp that resonance.
No Rez, designed by Danny Richie of GR Research. It is expressly for absorbing speaker enclosure wall resonance, being installed on the interior of the enclosure's panels. Very effective.