So what would you want them to use? Also remember that the big speaker companies are not going to Home Depot to buy their mdf. They have it manufactured to the specs of the speaker. One speaker manufacturer might use 10 different types of mdf in their speaker lines. They use mdf due to its stability predictability and consistency of the product. Would you prefer a natural wood box that will effect the sound differently from speaker to speaker and sidewalls to sidewalls. Would you like a material that will break down faster resulting in your expensive investment being junk in a few years. If you don’t like what they do don’t buy them buy the material your self and build your own. Let me know how that works. Class action? This idea tells me which way you lean!
Why are there so many wooden speakers?
I have noticed a problem within the speaker industry. 99% of speakers that come onto the marketplace are wooden, i.e MDF.
This is true of old speakers and new speakers. This is true of Dynaudio, B&W, Elac, Kef, revel, PMC, Focal, ATC the list goes on and on. This is a longstanding problem that has been deceiving audiophiles for decades and it requires a solution.
The problem with a wooden box is that no matter what crossover or drivers you use, it will still sound like a wooden box.
There is a limit to the sound you can get out of a wooden box so it is not possible to improve the sound just by using different drivers. Despite this, every year or two, the aforementioned companies put new speakers on the market claiming that they sound even better than what came before. In conclusion, we are being misled.
I have no problem with MDF boxes per se. MDF is a good material to use. But if you want to make an even better speaker then you obviously need to use a better material. You cant use the same material and say you have made a better speaker. Thats false.
Let's take the B&W 600 series for example. This is a series that has been going on for decades.
Here is the latest speaker from their current series
https://www.bowerswilkins.com/home-audio/607
There is no mention of what wood is used but I'm pretty sure its MDF. All they talk about is their continuum woofer and dome tweeter that goes up to 38khz. No mention of even improvements to the crossover let alone the cabinet.
I believe that this has gone on for long enough and audiophiles deserve better treatment. I don't know if a class action lawsuit is the answer but something needs to change.
This is true of old speakers and new speakers. This is true of Dynaudio, B&W, Elac, Kef, revel, PMC, Focal, ATC the list goes on and on. This is a longstanding problem that has been deceiving audiophiles for decades and it requires a solution.
The problem with a wooden box is that no matter what crossover or drivers you use, it will still sound like a wooden box.
There is a limit to the sound you can get out of a wooden box so it is not possible to improve the sound just by using different drivers. Despite this, every year or two, the aforementioned companies put new speakers on the market claiming that they sound even better than what came before. In conclusion, we are being misled.
I have no problem with MDF boxes per se. MDF is a good material to use. But if you want to make an even better speaker then you obviously need to use a better material. You cant use the same material and say you have made a better speaker. Thats false.
Let's take the B&W 600 series for example. This is a series that has been going on for decades.
Here is the latest speaker from their current series
https://www.bowerswilkins.com/home-audio/607
There is no mention of what wood is used but I'm pretty sure its MDF. All they talk about is their continuum woofer and dome tweeter that goes up to 38khz. No mention of even improvements to the crossover let alone the cabinet.
I believe that this has gone on for long enough and audiophiles deserve better treatment. I don't know if a class action lawsuit is the answer but something needs to change.
143 responses Add your response
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Probably the biggest expense. Company's are using sound deadening treatments to coat the inner walls of these wood cabinets. Mine are layered birch plywood with an aluminum core then the innermost gooped with some sound crap that kills resonance inside the box. very expensive to implement, but JA could find 0 vibrations when tested. Kef is using activated carbon and other companies are experimenting to improve the traditional wood box to keep the product affordable while improving sound. |
fbgbill12 posts08-01-2020 5:39am Why the f#$k did I read this posting? Another dumb speaker argument. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> You can UN read it. Yea, but only on the "kenjit" forums. That little wheel right under the time when it was posted (only your post though). If you click on that, it has, edit, delete, and then UN read. When you click that, your mind will erase it, just like magic.. Only on the kenjit stuff though.. That might help... I never use it. You know there are "The Disciples of kenjit", be aware there everywhere. I heard on the flip side of every record produced from, 1999 on has a message. If you play the last song BACKWARDS, it will say "The Box Is Dead" and you will hear a match light as its being dragged over the safety striker... Yup... Everywhere, Lyons and Tigers and Bears, oh yea... Regards |
… Aren’t violins made of wood? Guitars, pianos, Clarinets, bassoons. Why would it occur to someone to pick on wood as being on unmusical?
Some very special woods too. Yes that is the problem, they have a sonic signature. You want nothing in reproduction, just the sound, nothing more, nothing less. Regards |
Creating music and music reproduction are very different endeavors with very different criteria for the materials used to accomplish them. Instruments can have a distinct and desirable sonic signature. Hi-fi music reproduction should have as little sound signature as possible. The material used for hifi speakers is less important than how it’s used (within reason). MDF is a pretty decent affordable material if adequately shaped and braced. It can be cut, curved, drilled, veneered, and painted, Concrete and other stone can sound awesome but is pretty impractical to ship, and difficult to work with. Birch ply and other hardwoods can be fine too, but are more prone to resonance and warpage than MDF, and the environmentalists are likely to give you more grief for using it if you choose exotics. MDF on the outerwalls with pressboard bracing works out pretty nicely IME. Old pine is great for guitar and organ music production, but not so much for hi-fi music reproduction |
Can you post some photos of your system? Just curious about the speakers you have chosen for yourself right now. Harder than it sounds. He is still working with the National Park Service on getting a permit to install his speakers in the only wall big and thick enough to meet his requirements, El Capitan. |
If anyone was really curious about vibration control it'd be easy to add rigidity to a box. Go to Home Depot, but a pack of ceramic or porcelain floor tiles, and attach them to the flat spots on the speakers. Some double sided carpet tape might be enough to test with as long as the tile is completely flat. Those tiles are extremely stiff and would definitely take any flex out of the box when attached adequately. You could also embed metal in the MDF the way Merlin did to reduce box flex. I've been working on a concrete baffle kit for a while, I posted about it a couple of weeks ago. I've got it to the point where there's something to show but it's not done yet, too many other higher priorities. https://imgur.com/fzHUooF |
This statement is completely false. "The problem with a wooden box is that no matter what crossover or drivers you use, it will still sound like a wooden box." A good amp can take the soundstage way out of the box. We have proved this over and over again with a pair of AR-510 speakers from the old days. Complete cheap drivers in a square box. With the right components (in our case power amp) the boxes just disappeared. Happy Listening. |
@cakyol - I think the cost of changing from MDF to something else is most likely of less benefit than making other changes so companies focus on improving drivers, etc. If you can make a 5% performance improvement by spending $40 more on drivers and can make a 2% performance improvement by spending $40 more on a box, it's not a hard decision. It's not that hard to understand. Cost is a factor for almost everyone. Sane buyers want the best return on their money. Is it sane to demand that manufacturers spend money inefficiently? (no) |
Kenjit and I are close friends. He doesn’t post pics in order to save his intellectual property rights. His speakers are made of hollow concrete filled with lead (Pb) granules. They are incorporated into his walls; a boxless design. They are immovable; therefore they are perfect. His neighbors keep slashing his stainless steel protective mesh and destroying his perfect drivers. It puts him in a “Mood”, every week when this happens. So he vents on Audiogon. His neighbors fail to see and hear the absolute PERFECTION of his design. Countless manufacturers have turned him down; they don’t appreciate his genious! He keeps hoping that Audiogon members will see his genious! is it working? Can I go tell him he has at least ONE convert? im really worried about him... |
Here you go Glass Speakers right here on Agon buy em before it's to late. https://www.audiogon.com/listings/lisa36c5-waterfall-audio-niagara-platinum-speaker-pair-full-range |
Open Baffles made from solid hardwoods gets my vote. I’ve owned a pair made from both Maple and the second were made from Sapale. All solid wood produced by a craftsman woodworker who was also an audiophile. The 15” bass from an Augie driver were the absolute tightest and most natural bass I’ve heard. I sold both pair like an idiot. Now I use electrostats made partially from African wengewood. A minimal of mdf if any. One has to think outside the box. |
I think it is incorrect to say that wood box speakers today are no different than 20 or 50 years ago. In the last 10 years or so, access to inexpensive but accurate CAE software has become available to speaker manufacturers, and now they can design and tune their "Wood boxes" like never before. Finite Element Analysis allows a speaker designer/engineer to check out the modal performance of a speaker before it is built, and improve it greatly. They have always braced boxes, but now the can do design iterations in CAE, optimize bracing, and make the old wood box perform like never before. Getting rid of box resonance has never been easier that it is today. Once the design is optimized, you still have to listen to it of course and tune it properly, but they start off with a much better box than before. They can take one variable out before they even start. -Geoff |
I used to work at Gate's Learjet factory. The cabinets built for them were corrugated aluminum with real wood veneer. They sound deadened the interior with lead vinyl sheets. I would think these materials would make great speaker cabinets. But it would probably quadruple the price of a typical set of speakers. |
I have been a few times to Hollywood sound in Hollywood FL, I believe they are the distributors of Canalis, their speakers are made of bamboo with steel plates to reinforce the drivers. man, they are so freaking good sounding. I wish i could afford them. The
Canalis Allegra 2.0 are fantastic. MDF is not match to bamboo. |
Don't we have a few speaker manufacturers that hang out here? This is all at the theoretical level - it would be nice to take it to the experimental level. Get a manufacturer to make a pair of speakers (perhaps their mid priced models) in two or three of the materials discussed here. Then do a blind listening session with everything identical except the cabinet materials. If no one can tell the difference, discussion over. If they can, it would be interesting to hear what those differences might be. |
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@wspohn I have done this. This was literally part of the process I used when starting up my company to identify what materials I wanted to use in cabinets and if cabinet material makes and difference at all. I have created the same speaker with MDF, bamboo, fiberglass and carbon fiber and a 3D printed version using carbon fiber reinforced ABS. The only deviation was the internal brace was thicker in the bamboo (.5") and MDF (.75") compared to the other materials. Used the same drivers, crossovers, ports, wire, binding posts, even weighed polyfill down to the fraction of an ounce. There is an obvious difference in sound as stiffness of the cabinet increases and in the case of fiberglass and CF materials I use, damping improves. What happens is the tweeter is literally louder in the stiffer materials. SPL is measurably different and the amount of detail you hear decreases as the quality of the cabinet material drops. You can offset this by adjusting resistor and capacitor values in the crossover but this tends to make the speaker slightly brighter in a bad way. In order of cost, MDF, Bamboo, Fiberglass with nomex honeycomb core, 3D Printed CF reinforced ABS and Carbon fiber with a nomex core. I used an ETON Ceramic Magnesium Tweeter and a Symphony II driver and had the crossover design completed by a third party. These materials were chosen because cost to prototype wasn't insane. Aluminum costs to prototype are insane. As are titanium and casting a thermoplastic like phenolic resin. 3D printed was by far the worst. My wife said it sounded like I taped a sock over the tweeter the sound was so flat. This was so bad, I never took measurements and have abandoned the idea of a 3D printed speaker for the near term. In CF, the speaker is forward above the crossover point. The speaker is/was extremely detailed and a little bright. In fiberglass, it was neutral to laid back. A relative lack of detail though it didn’t sound bad. In this case, the only difference is the # of layers and type of composite. The difference in sound is not small. Anyone can hear this difference unless you are suffering from some kind of hearing damage. I don’t mean the difference in sound between two cables, I mean the difference in sound profile between Klipsch and Sonus Faber. Even in the final products, although the drivers and crossover in my Nightshade and Blackthorn products are physically interchangeable (same size and mounting points), they sound radically different and I could never swap Nightshade drivers in Blackthorn cabinet without first making a crossover change and vice versa. Bamboo outperformed MDF unsurprisingly (it is stronger and denser) and both underperformed relative to fiberglass. The major difference (and what made the test somewhat unfair) is that the sandwich panels I use are self damping. They are literally designed to deaden sound in transportation applications like helicopters and planes. Bamboo and MDF both lack these properties and need some additional help. Simply using the right insulation inside the cabinet can radically improve performance of MDF and Bamboo. When additional measures are taken; mounting mid-range and tweeter in another material like aluminum, using a different material for the baffle altogether, using fiberglass, rock-wool, etc..., using higher mass drivers, and I am sure countless other approaches can radically improve performance of wood and MDF. But again, when you are holding everything else constant, the differences between these five materials are not small. Anyone could tell the difference. It is highly debatable as to whether the incremental cost for any of these advanced materials is worth it. The paint-job on my Blackthorn or Nightshade speakers costs me more than a pair of Kef LS50s so this becomes an argument about diminishing returns and value which is personal. |
