birch plywood
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Feed the speaker the impulse and rejoice or weep with the results..... the cabinet stores and releases energy how much, at what frequency and over what amount of time is critical people do like all manner of distortion, coloration, etc.... the fact of the matter is there are few if any cost no object designs out there, so MDF in hands of capable designer is a very cost effective material..... |
Who gives a fig anyway...the best speakers I ever heard were a Bozak B-313b bookshelf speakers. Great drivers and crossovers in a plywood veneered whatever box. Didn’t care, they were unbelievably musical and dynamic and did justice to all kinds of music. Sometimes execution means more than pseudo intellectual techno babble from wanna be designers. |
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@ebm. So true that high performers,or expensive items, are often maligned by those who can’t afford them. It’s funny really :) many Timex wearers think Rolex is a total waste of money since it doesn’t keep time any better ;) And for those types; often artwork is simply ink on paper - another waste of money .... |
@veroman I don't know, having just ended a 25-year relationship with one resonance approach (expensively minimized), and invested in a completely different one (optimized/lossy, to my surprise), I find this a pretty interesting thread. I don't know that one approach dominates, but the design choices are intrinsically fascinating. |
invictus005 is completely on point in his post! And, since I work for Paradigm, I’ll toot our own horn on this subject... In regards to the Paradigm Personas: The drivers are the only things we want to "sing" so we developed an enclosure that is completely inert. The enclosure is the launch pad for the drivers, holding them rigidly in place and dissipating the rear sound wave that they create, so that only the sound created by the drivers enters the listening room. To do this we build the enclosure out of seven sheets of wood composite material - High Density Fiberboard (HDF) with a Viscoelastic adhesive in between each sheet in a "Constrained Layer" configuration. While the composite materials are being formed into the characteristic curved shape in a 5-ton press, a combination of heat and high frequency RF radiation is applied to begin curing and setting the adhesives. The curing process takes from 2 to 5 days. After that, the enclosure is carved to the proper dimensions with a 5-axis CNC router. Lastly the FEA optimized marine plywood bracing is inserted and the end caps are installed. From there, it goes to the paint shop to get its luxurious finish applied. This process involves 10 coats of primer and paint, with both hand finishing and new robot finishing methods utilized in between coats. From start to "finish", the cabinets take over 4 weeks to complete. This is the ideal way to build a cabinet for an ultra-high performance loudspeaker. The only reason it’s not more widely used is the massive investment in tooling that is required. The result is a cabinet whose beautiful curves and fit and finish enhance its overall appeal and performance - much like a world class sports car. So in short, having the resources we have at our 225,000 sq ft facility near Toronto, we can use anything we want to build cabinets, and this was only to explain how we build our best products. All the technology in drivers and crossovers don’t matter if you put them in a poor environment. There is more I can share on our Personas, but I only wanted to explain what the subject pertained to. Thanks to everyone who took, or takes, the time to read this, I appreciate it. |
I hope it is OK if I ask this here, as search engine brought me here. Do all these factors also apply to the foundation mounts for high end car audio woofers? Specifically, which is a better material for mounting 6.5" Focal Utopia woofers, mdf, wood, or aluminum? Or does it simply not matter for a cylinder shape in the same way it does for a closed cabinet? If I use CDT aluminum car speaker mounts, cnc'd specifically for my car, anything wrong with lining the inside of the cylinder with 1/8" closed cell foam? thank you in advance. |
All companies believe they have the best approach. Implementation still matters the most. You can have the most inert cabinet, but if your speaker is bright and fatiguing or can't image or has terrible bass, it won't matter. Ton's of approaches to building a cabinet and lot's of great speaker choices. We are lucky to be in a great age of audio where we have so many options. |
Out of curiosity, as I am planning to build my first speaker soon, would MDF with a glued on Formica (smooth countertop laminate material) on the “inside” of the box work, or would the extremely hard Non-porous Formica cause too harsh of a sound? I know I’d have to have some sort of sound batting or something inside also. |
There are some who still feel that using MDF alone in a traditional cabinet is a tonal midrange killer. So naturally enough many other options have been explored, all usually costing far more than the readily available and cheap to work with MDF. Some cynics might argue that they were the only reasons for MDF becoming almost ubiquitous in the last 2/3 decades. More recently composites have become increasingly popular. Peter Comeau, formerly of Heybrook, now working with IAG-owned brands like Wharfedale, Quad, Audiolab and Castle, has been studying cabinet resonances for decades, and now uses chipboard/MDF composite panels for his loudspeakers. Harbeth stick with MDF / bitumen damping panels but their cabinets use a unique ’lossy’ construction which flies in the face of all those who favour high rigidity above all else. Harbeth also firmly believe in using veneer on both sides of the speaker panels - presumably to ensure long term stability. Nobody yet has claimed to have been able to make those pesky cabinet resonances totally inaudible, and it’s difficult to see how they could, but the choice of where to put them will always partially depend upon what material you use to build your box. Fans of panel or open baffle speakers will have to look for other things to worry about. https://www.google.com/amp/s/zstereo.co.uk/2018/10/20/peter-comeau/amp/ |
I really enjoy my solid wood (Sapele) speakers. Most speaker companies will not build their speakers out of solid wood because the expense would be to high. There is a correct way to build speakers out of wood which is very time consuming. I know there is more cost to a speaker then the cabinet. But I couldn't spend 10's of thousands of dollars on a MDF cabinet with bondo filling the gaps. As for sound goes. Everybody has a personal preference no matter what it's made out of. Find the best speaker that plays the most genres of music really well. |
@invictus... you clearly don't I am a professional musician Not a single solitary vintage marshall or fender cabinet is made of plywood, MDF, or particleboard. They are almost exclusively made of Birch. So you can flap your gums all you want but the actual fucking MUSIC is made with solid wood instruments, solid wood cabinets etc... END OF STORY |
Helomech, you make a lot of good points, well done. Its funny everyone gets caught up in cabinet shape, wood or not, shape etc, when the room you put the speakers in makes far more tonal difference than the cabinet. AS you move up the quality and lower the noise floor some of these tiny differences like metal vs wood and other small details start adding up so they do matter. But for most, at home or the studio, the room is the issue that divides great sound from just okay sound. Brad |
I was once in prison and made homemade speakers on the cell block for people... I used layers of hardback books to make the boxes and made my cones From drawing paper, used earth magnets and my coil wire I got out of the transformer in an alarm clock radio. I also built dual bridge rectifiers that I tied into the sound chip to double the power going to it. My voice coils were a total of 8 layers thick.. (4 coils)for one speaker... (2 coils for left channel and 2 for the right channel) but mono output.......... Not much to do in there so I spent my time learning .... Just sharing an experience...... |
