You can't separate it; good drivers in a bad cabinet sound bad; bad drivers in a good cabinet sound bad. In a speaker, even more than other components, execution of the total package is critical. Most of my speakers use the BBC "Thinwall" design where a thin outer cabinet is carefully damped internally. My Gamut L5s have a very heavily braced narrow cabinet. The Apogees have no cabinet. All are excellent speakers. Deader is obviously better but that alone will not tell the whole story; if money is no object then high tech materials should have advantages but a more conventional speaker still might sound better to you. Speaker prices are becoming totally unrealistic in terms of what most of us can afford but conventional cheaper speakers still give high quality sound. Sometimes I think the exotic materials are used at least partly to justify the high costs. Asking whether the cabinet or drivers is more important is like asking if the engine or chassis is more important in a race car, if you don't have both you wont go anywhere.
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?
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?