Medium Density Fiberboard...good 'n cheap...and perfect for amateur efforts. Do you know what granite is going to do to your carbide (assuming you bought the best) drill bits and router bits? Stick with the easy materials...you'll have enough to worry about in voicing your crossover--and wait till you try to make the 2nd speaker a clone! Off-the-shelf drivers (esp tweeters) will match only within 1-2 dB, requiring more crossover tweaking to create a reasonable stereo pair that doesn't image like those funny-mirrors at the carnival! Yeah, speaker designing was fun, but now I leave it to the few pros who truly sweat the details with very careful custom-driver spec and matched-pair cloning. Material choice is quite secondary to transducer and crossover response issues. Sorry to wax pessimistic on you...I'm not really the grinch who stole Xmas, am I?..... I carefully voiced a 3-way 8/5/1 design a few years ago, and was surprised that a 1/3 dB change across 1.5 octaves in the upper midrange was so noticeable as a change in spectral character. After I was reasonably satisfied, I swapped the drivers for the second set, let 'em break in, yet ended up hearing a COMPLETELY different speaker! And these were supposedly darned nice SEAS drivers. But it is unfortunately very routine for transducer manufacturers to sell tight middle of the curve to large buyers, and then dump the outliers into the hobbyist market! Unless you're prepared to buy several thousand drivers OR spend megabucks for custom configurations you'll not be able to purchase close-tolerance pairs. Snell, Boston Acoustic, et al have great QA on the sensitivity and response of their raw drivers--unfortunately they can't voice a system successfully!--and I'm not sure you can buy their drivers. An engineer I know at BA thinks highly of their raw tweeters, for what it's worth. Maybe the pricier Dynaudio, Morel, etc drivers can be ordered as a matched pair...I'm not sure anymore....... It's interesting for me to note that Verity Audio chose to use a 1" thick granite slab in between their satellite/woofer base sandwich, with thin sorbo pads, as a coupler/energy-controller-dissipater. But making a box, especially with non-parallel walls, out of granite? Maybe you can find a good deal on diamond-tipped tools? Good luck, and let us know how it turns out. Happy holidays.
Speaker Enclosures
I have recently come into some granite counter top material(A neighbor is in the remodeling business and offered it to me). Has anyone had any success trying to make speaker enclosures out of this stuff? I have enough to make two medium enclosures but have no clue if it is even feasible to attempt. If any of you DIY'ers out there have any info I would appreciate it before I bite off more than I can chew.