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Speaker cabinets: How important is inert

First let's assume that the best school of thought is for speaker cabinets to have zero characteristics of their own, i.e it's completely silent.

A lot of the premium speakers like Rockport, Magico, YG, Kharma, Wilson all boast custom cabinets which are supposed to be "dead," which will let the drivers do their jobs without having the cabinets interefere. There are also premium speakers that uses braced MDF like TAD, Tidal, the lower Rockport lines, Avalons, etc which are supposed to be almost as good.

I'm not in the market for speakers, but everytime I look and listen to different speakers, I almost always prefer the big heavy duty cabinet speakers, and not the slim shaped refined looking speakers.

So my question is - do these custom epoxy or sandwiched or aluminum or whatever cabinets make a HUGE difference over plain MDF or braced MDF, or is it just marginal? How much of the secret to a good sounding speaker is in the cabinet engineering versus the drivers?
enzo618

Showing 3 responses by mlsstl

mlsstl
1,452 posts
 
With speaker drivers housed in cabinets, the fundamental issue is what does one do with the rear wave from the back side of a driver? That wave is just as strong as the front one. That energy does not magically go away, so it must be taken into account.

A dense cabinet in and of itself will only trap that energy inside the speaker and it will reemerge through the speaker cone as delayed sound. This smears the sound.

Ports and other devices work only in a lower range of frequencies. Padding and stuffing only work well at upper frequencies. However, if one is not careful, not getting rid of this rear driver energy can easily create issues in the lower midrange where our hearing is particularly sensitive.

Harbeth & classic Spendors use the BBC damped thin wall design. Other speakers use other approaches, but by itself, a cabinet that is simply dense doesn't address the issue.

Like any engineering problem, it requires a system approach to address the problem.
mlsstl
1,452 posts
 
Given there are hundreds and hundreds of speakers on the market, there are obviously a variety of opinions as to what is the best approach to speaker design.

The Vas parameter is used in determining the bass performance of the speaker. One can model a number of different box volumes and see a significant change in performance under 100 Hz but virtually no impact on the performance above. If you reread what I wrote above, it is this range above the bass where it is often difficult to control the back wave re-radiating through the driver cone material.

Of course, cone material can be selected that is better in this one area, but that cone material may represent a loss of performance in other areas. Almost all engineering efforts represent finding those compromises that result in the best balance in the opinion of the designer. And, as is routinely demonstrated on this forum, there a considerable range of variety in those opinions. ;-)
mlsstl
1,452 posts
 
No disrespect taken (but then I've never worried too much about that issue one way or the other...)
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