@kenjit I would love to hear if you have left the sidelines and purchased your first system. Tell us what you own please.
Why are there so many wooden box speakers out there?
I understand that wood is cheap and a box is easier to make than a sphere but when the speaker companies charge tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for their speakers, shouldnt consumers expect more than just a typical box? Are consumers being duped?
Back in the 70’s a speaker engineer found that a sphere was best for a speaker. A square box was the worst and a rectangular box was marginally better.
The speaker engineers have surely known about this research so why has it been ignored?
Cabasse is the only company doing spheres. Should wooden boxes be made illegal
183 responses Add your response
Baffle shape, size, rounded edges, etc. are all things done by many manufacturers. Forget the sphere as the front of it is doing most of the work here.
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K some think outside “the box,” but with a keen eye on making a living. Bose 901 with its novel driver array and extruded final form comes to mind, as does Ohm with essentially no box at all. A marketplace doesn’t always reward the crazy ones, but we’re lucky to have those willing to take the risk. I recall a round speaker from the ‘70’s that were affectionately referred to among my crowd as “the orbs.” They were fun to listen to, but I suppose not enough demand led to their demise. The B&W line is reminiscent of these old speakers with their spherical upper driver enclosures. Perhaps an evolution? |
Thanks to Kenjit, above, for an OK answer to my intervention. I take a leaf from your book ok but maybe not the whole book. You raise a good question. It is easy to dismiss and make fun of. But unless we point out the critical problems in audio, we won't make progress. And this box-wood-easy-piece tendency seems like a real problem, yes. Even if the higher level marketplace is (all the more?) dominated by a huge variety of speaker forms, shapes and types. This is part of what makes the hobby interesting, for me. Should a speaker be spherical or square? Rigid and dead, or should it "sing" a bit, along with the drivers? There is now new evidence that the shape of the violin helps produce a third note beyond the two being played. This has been known by players and violin makers for centuries but now there are hard data too. The better the third tone, the more costly the violin.
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I've mentioned upthread that the two pyramid parallelepiped shapes tested per the Olson paper @kenjit cites performed approximately as well as the ideal sphere. Guess which shape Jones actually used? Hint: it wasn't a rectangular prism. |
There are more speakers built with plastic and wood products than actual wood. BUT, there are so many wood box speakers out there because wood is cheaper than more superior materials like granite. Remember that speaker manufacturers have a business plan based on staying in business. so they have to have tight cost management on the materials supply side. |
Kenjit urped: "Why does Andrew jones use multi faceted cabinets if perfect square edges would suffice? Is it not to recognize the great wisdom of Master Kenjit and take a leaf out of his book? Has the great Master Kenjit been vindicated?" Again, only questions and no substance. Roxy is correct, master of nothing. Actually, just a master-baiter! Rubbing everyone the wrong way ... |
I think the conclusion is clear now. I am right. Andrew Jones has used multi faceted cabinets and this proves my theory. However a multi faceted cabinet isnt the same as a sphere so it won't be as good. But the point is he did attempt to apply my technology and that vindicates me since whatever Andrew Jones says or does must be correct since he is a such a distinguished speaker tuner. Long live the Kenjit! |
You can't expect any more proof from me than from any other speaker engineer. Can Andrew Jones PROVE that his Sourcepoint ten speakers are any better than the rest? Or is it really just another wooden box with drivers? Didn't Tannoy do a box just like that decades ago or have the audiophiles forgotten?
I have given plenty of pearls to the forum but they have all fallen on deaf ears. If you want better sound, you will need to get rid of those boxes Dill. That is the truth. If you dont like my nuggets I suggest you stop reading them. |
...late again to the party...*sigh* My diys' are sans wood.....foamed PVC surrounds, no box to speak of....cylinders, yes....with a foamed core. Two pairs hardly have a 'base shaft' cylinder at all....'acoustic suspension', a la the early ARs', rolled off to a sub. Not heavy, either... @dekay, liked the owls....*S* There's about 3 or 4 of them in the area at night 'round here, 'who?ing' about whatever they do it about.... Nice... |
@csmgolf , not likely...but it's like watching a tennis match played with golf balls instead of the fuzzy ones.... ;) Fast. Loose. Not totally predictable, but draws a crowd.... 😏 |
Seriously for a moment, now.... Wood and its’ variants as a enclosure is all well and good. With the advent of CNC/CAD-CAM/3D printing (no longer in infancy, noooo), ’boxes’ can be ’put up on the shelf’ ( to pun badly ) and other designs can be explored... Wood, plastics, CF, glass....even the concrete’ mystique’ if one opts for that....’shotcrete’ a shape that compensates for resonance and vibration modalities... Infinity beconds....sound from sculpture? Why not? Make SAF go ’foom’....;) |
All the Kenidjit manages to do, is to cheapen Audiogon. Audiogon wants to be the premier place for high end audio discussion, and for the sale of used high end audio gear. Can you imagine if one of his threads, any one of the really, as they are all the same, was the first thread a new visitor to the forum arrived at? they would be “This is the dumbest crap I’ve ever read” |
Kenjitt and Urbie both. @perkri +1 |
the question should be why are so many manufacturers using wood like guitars, furniture, etc. I guess the old violins are not worthless right!
It seems easier to make changes to a design for example tweeter placement, just out a new piece of wood and drill a new how instead of re-tooling to make a change to hear the differences. |
Wooden speaker Boxes ?🤔 🤔 |
@rick2000...an interesting variant on 'playing a guitar', but....*shrug* On one hand, I've got one of those SAE parametric eqs' myself in the 'shop' system. An adjunct to the receivers' tone controls, allows to zero in on the details of which the devils create....*G* @fisher_400 , yeah, damn few injection enclosures pass muster...usually too light, too thin, too small with drivers to match... Not saying small isn't beautiful...nice bookshelf stuff out there but typically of a 'practical' size driven by a given frequency range... I'm sidestepping the whole enclosure issue basically, because I can. Not that a box of any design wouldn't work, I just rather not go there. Minimalist at heart, and generally stuck with smaller spaces. And the challenge of doing so beckons. *S* |
+1 @budjoe Olsen study used a miniscule 7/8" speaker. Mounting larger speakers would be more problematic and require proportionately much larger cabinets. Would be interesting to see some research on larger spherical speakers though.
Happy Holidays! |
Wood used for musical instruments, and wood used for speaker enclosures serve a completely different purpose. With musical instruments, the wood is supposed to resonate and become part of the sound. Speaker enclosures, no matter what they are made of, are supposed to be as acoustically inert as possible. Scientists have spent centuries trying to reproduce the signature sound the wood of a Stradivarius violin makes. Scientist and engineers have spent decades trying to get speaker enclosures to not have any sound. Make a violin out of, say, constrained layer damped wood, and it would sound horrible. Make a speaker out of highly resonant wood that is poorly damped, and it would sound horrible. |
What did you think they were going to use, a high quality cabinet that moves the back waves away from the drivers ( we don't want to hear the back waves do we ) then with the waves moving toward the rear to a material that will covert the energy of the sound waves to a vibrational energy. So what would be a good material to do that. you might ask. Well it turns out carbon fiber resonates at a very high frequency. Those high rates of vibration do create heat. Yes lets turn that rear wave energy into heat. Those little molecules in that fiber are just jumping all around. What does this all mean. Take a nice wine glass and ping. Makes a ringing sound. The just touch it your finger and it is easy to stop the vibration. Works well in a composition setting with carbon fiber and even light foam, almost like an air space. Well my head is going to explode so enough for now.
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I completely concur with your conclusions. Spheres are the correct shapes to be used. Boxes are only for convenience not for sound quality. Andrew Jones has used something that is faceted so he has clearly applied my theories. But unfortunately he couldnt do a sphere as it is not easy to do a wooden sphere. If Magico could lower their prices down by about 90% then I think that would even the score. That would enable manufacturers to produce spheres at reasonable prices. |
I would have no way of knowing the " correct shape ". Again it is very dependent on the material used. The idea that giving the rear waves off the back of the drivers random walls to bounce off of is fine only if you expect those waves to bounce around. If the materials of the cabinet are designed to take the energy (back waves) and convert that energy to heat, well then that is a different animal. |
Pay no attention to the fool behind the curtain, |
It doesn’t matter if it was from the seventies or not. It was correct and that is the key point that speaker companies have to understand. On the other hand, there is no modern research on speakers. If so, how come we are not seeing that reserach being applied to the products we see on the market? I have seen nothing new. The wooden box is ubiquitous and it needs to be made illegal. Andrew Jones has just released a speaker called the Mofi point source. In case you have not noticed he has applied the theory from the 70’s and although its not quite perfect, it does at least disprove your insinuation that the reserach done in the past is outdated and wrong. Come along now, repeat ten times after me: Long live the kenjit Standards!
Oh come on as if they are the only possible way to do a round speaker? Thats like saying if you like box speakers just buy a B&W? Are there not different ways to build box speakers so that audiophiles may prefer one box over another? Obviously there are. So why should round speakers be any different!
What do you do in the professional speaker industry? If I guessed that you make square boxes, would I be right? |
