@greg22lz you made a profound statement. "The difference between theory and reality"
So many theoretical designs and mathematical equations hypothesis and super expensive space age designs but does it sound great after 15minutes half hour and even after 15 hours of straight listening?
Aluminum is good material but a) need to be calculated to be low resonant and suitable for loudspeaker b) need dedicated tools, not suitable for DIY c) expEnsive. Natural Wood is good but only with heavy thk. Also need good practice and suitable tools. It is better to use playwood and MDF for DIY being easy to work, less expensive, good acoustic characteristics. It is perfect for final painting or to be dressed by low thk natural wood. In terms of constructability, it is preferable to use playwood for the bottom, front and top side and MDF for remaining panels. Reinforcements by playwood. No problem to glue MDF and playwood togheter as well final layer of natural wood if any. Please to consider that the real sonici part of loudspeaker are drives, crossover, wiring cable (internal and external should be adequate quality and dimensions) as well the cabinet should be heavy, strong, its very low resonance. Have a good DIY
Use 5/8 inch mdf, layer of non hardening glue, 3/8 hdf, layer of non hardening glue, and 5/8 plywood to support them. Near perfect without the cost. Perhaps put the hdf 1st. Toss up. Enjoy. You have 98-99% at reasonable cost. If you’re obsessive switch the 5/8 mdf for 5/8 + of granite for your baffle. Your there with the big boys at minimal cost.
There is nothing special about 6060 aluminum alloy. It is the most common material for all kind of aluminum parts. It is not expensive and very easy to machine. Modern CNC machines with carbide cutting tools cut this material like butter. 6060 has many heat treat variations. You can heat treat aluminum alloy to achieve certain mechanical properties and strength. Again T6 heat treat is very common and no brainer. Magico is made out of 6060-T6 aluminum alloy. Years ago when mechanical engineers design machines they will use cast iron for machine bases. Cast iron with graphite was resistant to vibrations. Another vibrations resistant materials are lead and asphalt and many more. Why Magico is made out of aluminum? Probably because it is cheap, easy to precisely machine, and process for example hard anodize.
Solid jarrah sounds excellent.It is a really dead sounding timber .I have used it laminated over MDF in larger speakers and as 100% solid in smaller speakers.It sounds much better than MDF or plywood to me.It is also great for turntable plinths and racks.Grado were also using it for some of their most expensive phono cartridges.It seems to have just the right density [medium-to high] and grain structure[short].It also looks beautiful.
“Why Magico is made out of aluminum? Probably because it is cheap.”
Whether aluminum is cheap or not is besides the point. If you look at all the complexities in the internal bracings that are used and machining of all those pieces and the time and cost to assemble everything you’ll get a picture why they cost so much. It’s certainly hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to run MDF boards through CNC machines and glue them up together, even when every other component, e.g., drivers, crossover parts, etc., are the same.
It helps to hear, literally, what is going on, by listening to the cabinet’s walls through a stethoscope, playing music and test tones. You find two things:
Flexing of the cabinet walls allows low bass to come through. Out in your room, this adds in phase to the direct sounds coming from your woofer, making the overall presentation warmer, and adding bass ’ambience’ below 80 Hz. The bass is less tight, less defined, of course. Probably makes the hifi sound ’better’ at soft volumes.
For low-bass flexing, braces help, granite helps, thick materials help, thin plywoods do not. Thin carbon fiber does not. Solid hardwood will split given time. Think here about maximizing panel ’stiffness’ or rigidity, not its ’strength’. Cement, concrete? Sure! FYI, paint the inside of wood cabinets with thinned-out wood glue-- as the surfaces of MDF and plywoods are porous, absorbing bass pressure whenever the woofer fires off.
The other stethoscope discovery is that a cabinet lets voice range sounds, in the 200 to 300 Hz range, come right through. This makes for ’scratchy’ sounds in wood boxes and for ringing sounds in granite and metal. These vibrations do not come from the SPL inside the cabinet (unless there is a large, undamped (loud) standing wave inside). Those 200-300Hz vibrations come from the direct excitation of the cabinet material via the screws mounting ’that’ driver. When you loosen all its screws, all of a sudden, the walls go silent!
One fix is to use rubber-mounted screws, but this makes bass impacts ’rubbery’. KEF and others tried this in the 80’s, giving it up after sales tanked from all that loose bass. The driver could be mounted to a regular inner cabinet with a vibration-isolated cabinet wrapped around it. Unfortunately, this leaves those inner-cabinet vibrations undamped, which get back to the driver, making its cone vibrate (= noise).
When these tones get into the cabinet material via those screws, there is no way to damp them, and no way to brace against them, because they travel inside the cabinet material, not on the surface. If those screws cannot be rubber-isolated, the cabinet material needs to have ’high internal damping’, which is not a property of metal, cement, nor most woods. Cabinet thickness does not matter here, at least for making something to fit in a home.
For a home constructor, I recommend 3/4" Baltic birch plywood cabinets, or at least for its front panel, with braces inlaid 6-8 inches apart, center-to-center. But BB plywood is such a tough wood to work with and to make pretty! Two 1/2" BB layers glued up with Elmer’s Carpenter’s Glue made a front panel that was a bit more dead to those midrange tones getting into it from the screws, but not enough to justify the extra work. It made far more difference to put 1/4" wool felt on the front baffle to suck up the tweeter’s reflections before getting on with designing the tweeter’s crossover.
MDF can be affected by relative humidity, which in turn affects any attached veneer. One must totally seal all exposed MDF surfaces to render it immune to the affects of humidity. Kind of a pain.
^Solid wood and plywood are even more susceptible. Solid wood, depending on treatment, will swell, or in the case of low humidity - crack. Plywood will begin to bend in as little as 60% RH. It takes very high humidity (>80%) to warp MDF - the level that would make for an unhealthy household.
I laugh when reading threads like this. It's as though there is an absolute or holy grail. All materials have different properties. All speakers have compromises.
Designers figure out what they want for their sound and build/design accordingly. They do a ton of R&D if they are large enough and will use all different materials. They can do modeling and figure out most of it on a computer. I think this is one reason the DIY groups started to grow again after they were kind of losing steam a bit in the early 2000's based only on what I've been told (I may be wrong).
Folks will find fault with all speakers. We all hear differently. I'm glad that folks who have Magico's love them, but to many they do ring and are fatiguing. I feel that Wilson's and their polymers and choice of drivers lose much of the micro and macro details, but boy are they dynamic. I love listening to Harbeths, but again, they too lack much detail, but man are they enjoyable. All use different cabinet materials.
I own Vandersteen's and I choice them over nearly everything I could possibly audition that was under 35k or so. He went the carbon fiber way years ago from house made cones to the cabinet. I also know that he 'auditioned' all the different weaves of carbon fiber that he could get and choice a specific on based on it's sound quality. It's a very expensive cloth as it's teh same one used in my ultra high end walking poles (I have MS and have poles to get around inside buildings when I can't use my rollator).
the bottom line is that some will find fault wiht the sound of the Vandersteen 7's as they will focus on his compromises, just like I get fatigued listening to Magico's as he's lifted the treble to make them sound more open on top etc... (if you measure speakers, many of them are lifted up to 3db in the high end to give them a more 'detailed and or larger soundstage".)
Again, it's all implementation and compromises. There is personal preference, which makes this hobby a blast, but no 1 correct answer.
@ctsooner Magico’s as he’s lifted the treble to make them sound more open on top
Listen, you can like what you like, I am not about to get into a Magico dirt fight again, but some basic diligent of facts, not opinions, are needed. It is actually the Vandersteen highs that are pronounced, not Magico (Plenty of measurements all over the place of current production models – you can start with Stereophile S5/Model 7). Vandersteen enclosures use of CF is minimal; they use a layer or 2 to basically veneered MDF. Vandersteen “CF” enclosures ring plenty; it is his pure MDF enclosures that are inert but, as the case with many “inert” cabinets, they are over-damped, again just look at measurements. Magico S5 THD measurements are the lowest ever measured at the NRC; rest assured, it will not be the case if they “ring”. Try listening with your ears, not your eyes, just because something is made out of metal, does not mean anything; does your car rings?
"Wasn't there a company making cabinets out of cast concrete?"
Maybe you are thinking of different brand, but early Hales speakers had concrete baffles. Paul Hales switched to MDF because of economy in creation and exporting the heavy speakers. I came across an Asian manufacturer making cabinets out of vases. They were trying to find US distribution. Nice people; I hope they didn't struggle too much before quitting the impossible mission of marketing it to US audiophiles.
MDF, if anything is ultimately practical and established. I have not heard a wood box speaker using Scanspeak drivers as good as what YG has achieved, and I welcome the variety and pioneering as MDF is not some panacea.
RV is a measurement and science based engineer, I can assure you that the 7 cabinet is superior to the 5a in every way. impossible to overdamp a passive component like a cabinet - you want to hear the Stradivarius or the cabinet ? the 7 cabinet is a mdf cabinet within a mdf cabinet with constrained layer damping ( he collaborate s with Michael at HRS, so my guess is that is is HRS supplied ( and you just know they are serious engineers ) and CF wrap cooked in an Autoclave. in a previous working life I dabbled in advanced composite structures... running arguably some of the most advanced high technology composite shops on the planet- simple stuff like the Hubble optical bench, F-22 wings, 787 fuselage..... easy stuff... i can assure you it is more than veneer now from a musical perspective, while I loved my 5a for many many musical years, the 7 mk 2 are lightyears on....
enjoy....
cueing up some late nite Sunday massed chorale..... perfect for a prayer of discernment....
Which material sounds better for speakers construction? Wood, Ply or MDF?
I haven’t read any of the answers, but something to ponder over which is material is going to flex the least, and becoming a sound board at certain frequencies in a speaker In my younger years as a comp surfer, I tried all three in the centre stringer of my comp surfboards, this could be a good indication. Flex and rebound is a good thing in a surfboard as it gives feel through a turn and rebound coming out of a turn (bit of a kick of speed) bit like snow skii’s when you get a good rhythm going in slalom racing
All three stringers (mdf wood ply) on surfboards being the same thickness, the one with the most initial flex is MDF as it has no grain it’s flexable but it doesn’t rebound (snap back) as good as, single ply of wood, single ply of wood doesn’t have the initial flex of the MDF though.
The stiffest with not much flex or rebound is the 3 ply of wood as all 3 plys are grained if different directions to each other and glued together.
So to me for speakers say thick 15 ply with all grains running in different directions will be stiffer, so not to flex much and become a sound board certain frequencies. Sure they will still have resonances but they should be well down and maybe easy to tune out with strategically placed bracing.
If I had time I'd love to play around with this. I'd try routing patterns in mdf and filling them with high strength concrete. A bag of 6,500 psi concrete costs $8 and it's hard for me to believe it couldn't be used in combination with other materials to create a great box that didn't need to cost or weigh a ton.
The Thiel CS 7 had a concrete baffle. There have been others. Thiel stopped using concrete because it was too hard to ship without breaking. I think the performance was great.
I think it'd be an interesting challenge to build a really high performing box that was made out of cheap materials. I'm sure it's possible, although maybe it wouldn't be practical for a manufacturer to mass produce. MDF and concrete are cheap. aluminum isn't all that expensive.
Actually aluminum is fairly inexpensive in the scheme of things. It's how it's implemented and tooled that adds any expense. Vandersteen had it right IMHO years ago when he went 'baffle less'. It still works in todays market, but many don't love the look of the sock covering. Teh Treo was basically the 2 in a full cabinet. form. He was able to make it sound works better though as he had a better price range to work with and is able to use better drivers and components.
Everything resonates. Surely it's a question of where you put these resonances.
I believe it's far too easy to muffle the midrange with MDF or medite. Many specialist manufacturers purposely avoid the use of MDF for their cabinets, or at the least prefer some form of MDF composites.
Harbeth (along with Spendor?) is the exception, but then their entire cabinet construction techniques are also an exception.
Wood...my Totem Cherry Forest Signatures Sound like a Stradivarius ! Fine musical instruments are made of wood. Can you imagine a plywood, MDF or aluminum violin 🎻. Yikes!!!
@dave_b - speakers aren't the same. Musical instruments are designed to resonate. That's how they get their distinctive sounds. Speakers, on the other hand, are designed not to resonate. The less they resonate, the less of their own sound they have and the better they can reproduce the distinctive sounds of musical instruments.
Dave, have you heard all of them? I highly doubt it. Not sure what price ranges you are talking about, but I'd love to hear your conversation with Richard Vandersteen or Alon Wolf about this, lol. Sorry, but you can't make that statement unless you have heard all of them. I promise you my Vandy Quatrro's are plenty organic adn alive like real music in my room. Plenty of speakers I've heard are outstanding and sound like live music and they are made of all different types of materials.
Totem are also nice speakers and I've enjoyed most of them at a local dealer as well as a dealer in NYC. There is no best. It's all design and implementation.
Ctsooner, I wasn’t implying any particular speaker was “the best” silly. I am saying that most of the speakers that I have owned tended to deliver a more natural sound when made of wood. The worst were the Wilson’s. Magico’s were overly deadened to my ears. Anyway, just saying I hear a dramatically improved sound with a well done wood speaker. Harbeth uses this approach as well I believe.
@georgehifi your post about the surfboard hits the nail on the head. It's easy to think that stiffer/stronger/more solid must be better, yet all the strength in the world is no good if the cabinet becomes a soundboard at a critical frequency, especially in the midrange.
It's possible for loudspeaker cabinet materials to become almost transparent to the sounds coming from within the cabinet at certain frequencies again.
I think experiments have demonstrated that MDF untreated is more likely to act in this fashion.
And then there's the issue of a cabinet being too rigid and causing back pressure through the driver materials themselves.
Hugely complicated business is cabinet construction. Open Baffle gets around most of them but has its own issues.
What I do is I sits my arse down and listens....if it I get a “Holy Crap” feeling, this sounds so freaking real and alive like live music, I’m satisfied. Deadening anything too much sucks the life out of the music. You can hypothesize all day long, but results are what matters. I’ve owned the over damped, $20k plus speakers and found them soulless!
The worst were the Wilson’s. Magico’s were overly deadened to my ears. Anyway, just saying I hear a dramatically improved sound with a well done wood speaker. Harbeth uses this approach as well I believe.
The founders of Harbeth and Spendor did a lot of pioneering research into cabinet materials. Both companies now use cabinets made of MDF - and both are widely regarded as producing some of the most lifelike mids in the biz.
The problem with solid woods and ply woods is their inconsistency, their susceptibility to warping and greater difficulty in machining. Even voidless birch ply will have slight variations between batches that can make it difficult to create a consistent sound. Musical instruments suffer this same problem. I've played brand new guitars of the same make, model that sounded very different from each other, even after professional setup.
Daveb, sorry, I really misread your post, but those who know me, know that happens at times. It's the MS to be honest, so sorry if my post came off wrong. I agree, if you get a good feeling, that's what it's all about. I could easily live with Harbeth as they are just musical. Not the last word for detail or extension, but very nice speakers for anything.
I agree on natural wood and ply. It really is a big deal too. Especially when the cabinets aren't close to identical. Worse than not matching your caps and resistors in the crossover. lol
Vince at Totem makes cabinets impervious to environmental variations. They are unique in the industry. He also makes crossovers like few, if any others do.
Vince at Totem makes cabinets impervious to environmental variations.
Gotta love these sort of claims. No such cabinet exists, nor will it ever exist. Just as no driver is absolutely perfect, neither is any cabinet or crossover.
Ok Helomech the great...protector of things absolute! Within the normal standards of cabinet design, Totem makes their speakers far less susceptible to various environmental conditions. Their crossovers are special by virtue of quality and tolerances as well as being hardwired by hand.
Dave, none of us have said that Totem doesn't make a nice speaker. Many of you enjoy it's sound and feel it's a good value. I auditioned them often as my local dealer has the line. They weren't for me, but they were nice.
Not sure why you jumped on helmomech like you did. All he said was that you made a false claim.
BTW, I checked out most of their speakers on their site to see what hey are made of and they all seem to be MDF. I haven't seen solid wood on any of them. Which ones do you own? The problem with solid wood, other than movement, is that each wood as a specific density and sounds totally different. I have had many headphones. My favorite material for cups so far has been Purple Heart and Boccote (my ZMF Ori's are the rare Boccote). Sorry, not trying to get us off track on cabinet materials.
Ok Helomech the great...protector of things absolute! Within the normal standards of cabinet design, Totem makes their speakers far less susceptible to various environmental conditions. Their crossovers are special by virtue of quality and tolerances as well as being hardwired by hand.
I'm the "protector of all things absolute," yet you use the word "impervious" to describe a speaker cabinet. Seems to me that shoe is on your foot Davey.
"It helps to hear, literally, what is going on, by listening to the cabinet’s walls through a stethoscope, playing music and test tones. You find two things:
Flexing of the cabinet walls allows low bass to come through. Out in your room, this adds in phase to the direct sounds coming from your woofer, making the overall presentation warmer, and adding bass ’ambience’ below 80 Hz. The bass is less tight, less defined, of course. Probably makes the hifi sound ’better’ at soft volumes.
For low-bass flexing, braces help, granite helps, thick materials help, thin plywoods do not. Thin carbon fiber does not. Solid hardwood will split given time. Think here about maximizing panel ’stiffness’ or rigidity, not its ’strength’. Cement, concrete? Sure! FYI, paint the inside of wood cabinets with thinned-out wood glue-- as the surfaces of MDF and plywoods are porous, absorbing bass pressure whenever the woofer fires off.
The other stethoscope discovery is that a cabinet lets voice range sounds, in the 200 to 300 Hz range, come right through. This makes for ’scratchy’ sounds in wood boxes and for ringing sounds in granite and metal. These vibrations do not come from the SPL inside the cabinet (unless there is a large, undamped (loud) standing wave inside). Those 200-300Hz vibrations come from the direct excitation of the cabinet material via the screws mounting ’that’ driver. When you loosen all its screws, all of a sudden, the walls go silent!
One fix is to use rubber-mounted screws, but this makes bass impacts ’rubbery’. KEF and others tried this in the 80’s, giving it up after sales tanked from all that loose bass. The driver could be mounted to a regular inner cabinet with a vibration-isolated cabinet wrapped around it. Unfortunately, this leaves those inner-cabinet vibrations undamped, which get back to the driver, making its cone vibrate (= noise).
When these tones get into the cabinet material via those screws, there is no way to damp them, and no way to brace against them, because they travel inside the cabinet material, not on the surface. If those screws cannot be rubber-isolated, the cabinet material needs to have ’high internal damping’, which is not a property of metal, cement, nor most woods. Cabinet thickness does not matter here, at least for making something to fit in a home.
For a home constructor, I recommend 3/4" Baltic birch plywood cabinets, or at least for its front panel, with braces inlaid 6-8 inches apart, center-to-center. But BB plywood is such a tough wood to work with and to make pretty! Two 1/2" BB layers glued up with Elmer’s Carpenter’s Glue made a front panel that was a bit more dead to those midrange tones getting into it from the screws, but not enough to justify the extra work. It made far more difference to put 1/4" wool felt on the front baffle to suck up the tweeter’s reflections before getting on with designing the tweeter’s crossover."
Roy Johnson Green Mountain Audio
@royj, Sorry for almost missing your post. Every point you made/quoted seems to concur with what others have discovered through long arduous painstaking experiments. Thanks for that, Roy, I will print it off and keep it for reference.
No (esp solid sealed) cabinet can do it all (great bass, mid and treble), but the heavily damped thin walled approach championed by the BBC (Harbeth, Spendor, etc) seems to do the least damage in the precious midrange.
So many of those speakers LS3/5, BC1s plus innumerable Spendor or Harbeth models are renowned for the purity of their midranges.
The use of stethoscopes and accelerometers sure has a funny way of saving us all a lot of time and energy!
Even MDF, if not fully covered, will change character in high humidity or dry conditions. most companies cover their MDF with veneer and or paint to make sure this doesn't happen.
They are using a ton of marketing terms. I don't think there are any other companies out there that don't as they need to sell, lol. It's all good. They make a nice speaker. Some love them and some don't just like anything else.
@dav, the only question I have of you is what model do you have that is made of all wood? I can't find that on their site. Just MDF cabinets. Maybe I misread but I thought you said that your speakers are made of wood??? Curious, that's all... thanks Pete
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