Why are there so many wooden speakers?

When you tire of wooden speakers try these. 

http://www.stonesspeakers.it/

@sounds_real_audio,

"No surprise that monitor speakers with their small cabinets sound clean."


Absolutely. Cabinet problems can only get worse with size.

It’s no surprise that the largest manufacturing cost is usually the cabinet itself.

According to KEF.

"LS50 Meta’s baffle is engineered from an injection-moulded Dough Moulding Compound (DMC), while inside the cabinet cross bracing and Constrained Layer Damping (CLD) combine to deaden internal vibrations."

What exactly is DMC?

Come to think of it:

What exactly is the mysterious material X that Wilson uses for its cabinets?

What about Harbeth flying in the face of fashion with their thin walled lossy cabinets? They seem to be taking a 180 degree opposite approach to those who favour the heavier, thicker and more solid approach.

Current cabinet trends seem to be heading towards a layered approach (MDF or the better HDF).

Sometimes the layers might even be individually laminated - greater stiffness but with an increase of both mass and cost.

It all depends upon exactly where you want to put those pesky resonances.

As the OP pointed out, as long as you insist upon using a box, it will sound like a box.

Some more than others.

^Why?

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It says that Jesus and his Father Joseph were described as “tekton” in the new testament...

Because:
That’s what Jesus wood do.

Why is the sky blue turkey!!

I suppose you also think we should open a class action suit against the musical instruments manufacturers. Why in God's name are they insisting for centuries on building musical instruments out of wood instead to moving to better materials...
The answer is simple, because wood makes the music sound nice.

Wood ?

Earth first, we can log the other planets later....

BTW...ever hear real bass being played?  Attack and leading edge sound is virtually inaudible.  Mostly a studio effect or exaggeration.

Yeah...resonance is awesome!  Sounds like live instruments being played in a club.  

Great post. MDF does make bass notes sound muddy. Sounds waves from the back of the driver have the same output as the waves from the front. They reach the MDF and their energy is transformed into massive vibrations. Remember that energy can not be destroyed. Now the MDF is vibrating and dissipating that energy out into the room. The surface area of the exterior of the cabinet is often quite large so even a small amount of energy that reaches the cabinet walls is capable of producing a large amount of distorted sounds. No surprise that monitor speakers with their small cabinets sound clean.

Yea, finally got rid of my wooden cabinets and now hang raw drivers from the ceiling , less confining and the sound is much more open. LOL

Actually, Yo-Yo Ma only uses the carbon fiber cello for outdoor concerts.  His principal cello is a 1733 Montagnana from Venice, valued at $2.5 million.  He also plays a 1712 Stradavarius, the Davidov Stradivarius (likely worth $10+ mill) which was owned by the great cellist Jacqueline du Pre, who played it in the late 1960s and upon her death in 1987 made it available to Yo-Yo Ma. 

Been to the mountain top and find my bliss with good old fashioned 3 way box speakers...they just sound right!

MDF isn't exactly "wood". It is an engineered wood product.
AFAIK, violins and other string instruments continue to be made (exclusively?) with "real" wood such as maple.  But which if any company offers HiFi speakers with "real" wood cabinets? There'd be serious issues not only with raw material costs but even more with labor costs and quality control.  How would you even make a large box dense and stiff enough for the application, yet still allow for wood movement so it does not crack?  Traditional cabinet boxes typically are made with panels that float in a face frame.

IIRC, MDF did not become widely available until fairly recently (1980s-1990s). 
Before then, weren't most speaker boxes made from some other engineered wood product (such as plywood or "beaver barf" chipboard)? I suspect I'd prefer the sound that comes out of an engineered-wood box to the sound that comes out of a plastic/metal/concrete/fiberglass box (all else being equal ... which they probably wouldn't be.)  Anybody using bamboo, maybe?  It makes nice wind chimes. Couldn't somebody build a 2-way bass reflex cabinet from a big whomping cylinder of giant bamboo?

The best kept secret...
cement speakers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEdryqS8ij0 
 
Not connected with this speaker company in any way

@kenjit 

My next speaker enclosures are being cut as we speak.

Made from some of the most homogeneous and even-grained materials on earth!

Im using cut and polished slabs of cooled magma. Volcanic rock from Pompeii,  and an inner lining of a man-made composite of ancient volcanic ash, also from Pompeii, Italy. 

Ive found that the slabs are incredibly strong and inert. Not as heavy as “regular” rock, such as granite. 

Ive been selling plinths made of this material now for 20 years. It’s beautiful and very stable and inert.

And, this material is highly sustainable. 

Its just gorgeous when polished! With the popularity of rock kitchen countertops, the technology is local.

This is fun!

cement is the answer, not concrete but cement.

@djones51   I heard an expensive ($100,000+) glass cabinet speaker at the LAX show years ago.  It sounded mediocre at best (couldn't stand it), despite using similar high end equipment as the two adjacent booths/halls.  Wow, was that bad!   I do not think that a glass speaker is a wise choice for a cabinet (I noticed the one you selected was about $15,000).   The $8,000 Volti Rival was extremely superior sounding with modest equipment and it is all wood like a Klipsch.

Yo Yo Ma uses a Carbon Fiber cello made by Luis and Clark.  A company that makes wonderful sounding CF based string instruments.  
There are a bunch of academic papers on this subject of composite materials in production of traditional instruments and obviously, some manufacturers.  

That being said, I am not sure how this is terribly relevant since the goal with a cabinet is to dampen.  With a few exceptions, most speaker cabinets are intended to behave directly opposite how an instrument would work.  

Wood good...concrete carbon polymer unobtainium etc...bad!  Orchestra would sound very flat without wood based instruments 🎻 

@kenjit. The issue with making speakers where the only deviation is the cabinet is only one of them is going to sound okay to sell.  In my initial test only one speaker sounded good enough to sell.  The more poorly damped material needed significant mods to crossover and internal damping materials.  I would not sell my current cabinets with the same drivers without a crossover changes and that only reflect a deviation between fiberglass and carbon fiber.  
This would be a better “after hours” event at a hifi show like AXPONA.  If and when we have shows back I could set this test up for people to listen.  

Class action lawsuit? You're seeing a whole team of psychiatrists, aren't you?

For the 8" woofers I made hollow spheres out of particle board

Bass doesn't diffract off a cabinet. 

Polystyrene board can be broken by hand its too thin and weak. You can use cardboard too but not for high end audio only for low quality

I should have said "Another good one..."

Back in 1977 I read spherical enclosures have lower diffraction. So I made spherical enclosures for my tweeters and mid-ranges out of polystyrene bead-board. For the 8" woofers I made hollow spheres out of particle board. I covered the woofer enclosures with 0.25" of felt. I have a big foot sub-woofer I made from plans in an Audio magazine. I suspended the six spheres from the ceiling in the basement using ropes. The drivers are time aligned. I painted the tweeter and mid-range enclosures with gray paint last year so they are close to the same color as the woofer enclosures. The system still works well. I currently have it hooked up to a Yamaha PSR-190 keyboard. The crossovers are external to the speakers. I got help from Bob Ludwig in St. Louis on the design of the crossovers. It has nice inductors and capacitors. Wylie Williams said it was a labor of love. It is one of my good systems. I have ten systems. Another good on has two pairs of Magnapan 1.7i speakers spread out in a big room with two Velodyne subs. Polystyrene bead-board is non-resonant is my point.

Making the same speakers out of different materials and testing them would be poor engineering. Every time you change the material you change the material properties. Young's Modulus, density, and Poisson Ratio will be different, and so will the resonant frequencies of the design. You need to define materials up front, then design the speaker, not the other way around.
-Geoff

@kenjit, my speakers use hdf and aluminum, if you don't like mdf then only buy from manufacturers that use other materials.  if enough people do that then the others will switch to new materials or go out of business.
magico and yg acoustics will be glad to take your business. 

Thiel used thick pieces of real wood; at least that is what I have been told.  Most of their users seem to be really happy with them.

@timlub, have you ever considered using tiles to enforce a box?  I'm just a hobbyist who likes tinkering and I wondered if including a ceramic or porcelain tile in the wall would make a big improvement without costing much since they're mass produced and available for low cost per unit.  Say 3 layers of 1/4" mdf where there's a big square cut out of the middle layer that is filled with a  super stiff ceramic floor tile.  It'd add some time to construction but not much to materials and I'd think it eliminate almost all box flex in the low frequencies.  

My speaker cabinets are made out of doped paper and my drivers are made out of MDF.

Answer to O.P.: Because there are so many trees on earth. 

There's nothing inherently inferior about wood as a material for enclosures. There are certainly man-made materials with different damping/energy storage properties, but these often come with weight & cost issues associated. Moreover, there is no one man-made material I'm aware of that consistently makes a superior speaker enclosure, no matter who designs & makes the speaker.

Arguing the merits of different enclosure materials is somewhat like claiming that this or that digital chip makes a superior DAC: a helluva lot else goes into making a DAC, just as it does into making a loudspeaker.

Maybe you should just get planner type speakers and take the box out of the equation... 

I think our collective chains are being yanked by the OP, but the clever responses by folks far more witty than me have made this an interesting thread.  So far as I can see, MDF is an "engineered" wood product, but more immune to resonance issues.   Wood is wood, it seems to me, plywood of any composition included.  There are almost zero cost-effective alternatives so that is the simple answer to why wood is used in speakers.  

I had the oppty to hear a pair of Tannoy Westminster speakers this week, albeit clones, but employing the same birch plywood construction techniques as the real ones, with the addition of a wood-encased super tweeter, all powered by a very high-end tube-based front end.  Heck, if i had known that "wood" speakers were so tragically flawed, I would not have come to the conclusion that they were among the finest speakers my ears had ever had the joy of hearing.  

I did have a couple of pairs of Green Mountain Audio speakers, with enclosures made of a granite epoxy resin and they were excellent, but not intrinsically better than other wood speakers I have had, and brutally heavy.  I now have Spatial Audio OB speakers, which I think employ MDF baffles, and I have found them to be Holy Grail of speakers.

I had a pair of KHL Model 5 "wood" speakers a few years, recapped and re-wired, which were pretty sublime, with lots of balls in the LF driven by a tube amp.  I wish I had never sold them, a great "old school" sound, with a luscious mid-range response. Yet on my list of speakers to hear would be DeVore "wood" speakers, which garner tremendous praise and are the speakers of choice for many audio reviewers.  That said, I have heard many Harbeth speakers over the years that I found rather unmusical and drastically over-priced.   At any rate, it is difficult to imagine moving away from OB speakers for myself personally.    

@kenjit 
I wouldn't mind spending time with you discussing speaker design at some point.  Many of your arguments are valid, but if a manufacturer decided to build a no compromise cabinet,  very few could afford it.  I am grateful for plywood and mdf.  They allow me to build high quality cabinets that are affordable.  I have been very strongly contemplating going into manufacturing again.  I've been out of it for 35 years.  Just recently I've experimented with light weight concrete composites.  Vermiculite and styrene beads.  In the end, I have abandoned this idea.  In fact, I have been working with lighter wood products and using extensive bracing and deadening technics to built a very lightweight, strong and inert box.  It may not be as inert as I would like,  but I've done a few lightweight boxes that have produced very satisfying bass that can be handled much easier by an old geaser like me than your typical box..... It has been said all over.  Construction time,  Construction cost, Parts cost, time involved.... everything is a factor.  In the end,  The purchaser has to pay and the manufacturers are constantly juggling that cost vs selling price.  It isn't that a better cabinet can't be made or anyone wants to deny you.  I would suggest that you may fund a manufacturers development cost and I'm sure that you could get any type cabinet built that your hearts desire. Of course that isn't practical.... and practical is what this is all about.  Good Listening,  Tim (timlub)

The REASON to use wood is because any other option is WAY more expensive!   Sure other materials are used... and if you want them, you are quite free to pay for them!  
I have built 2 pairs of identical speakers (using 8" Tannoy concentric drivers), where the only difference was one pair used Baltic Birch ply, and the other pair was MDF.  The MDF's sounded markedly BETTER!  There was less... ummm.... woodyness, in the lower midrange.  I then proceeded to increase the internal damping of the birch ply with adhesive vinyl.  That helped, but the MDF boxes still sound better IN THIS CASE.  I'm not claiming that it's better for every situation.  For me to use any other material than wood would be extremely difficult and/or costly.   There is no wooden conspiracy as the OP seems to believe.    

@verdantaudio 

You need to let the audiophiles judge whether cabinets make a different sound. Its easy for you to say it makes a difference. Every company says that. If its such a big difference, why not produce 2 or 3 speaker lines each with a different cabinet and no other difference? I dare you.

I wish kenjit and I didn't share the same name. Please don't hold it against me. Suimasen.

Kenjit, That is the silliest question I have seen in a while. Wood is used because it is cheap. Why don't you fork up for a set of Wilson's so you can pay $250K for enclosures.

Acoustical instruments are never had from MDF.  Why?  It kills sound. You want to have an inert cabinet. With some bracing where needed, MDF makes for an excellent speaker cabinet.  Put wood veneers on it for looks.  Or, use sealing techniques and paint to a high gloss finish.  Nothing wrong with MDF.

@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.  

My Harbeth 40.2 Monitors are real wood veneer cabinets. I love these speakers. What's my problem? Should I be unhappy?

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.

Kenjit,

Buy a pair of Daedalus Audio speakers. Real wood; damned fine sounding IMHO. I love my Daedalus Apollos.