Cleaning & polishing premium-grade speakers


What do you use to polish and maintain exotic wood loudspeakers? I have a Crimson Birdseye veneer and I wonder if there is anything I can do to keep the shine as well as protect it. For the meantime, I just buff mine with a cotton shirt. Thanks!
dalton
All polishes and waxes are a joke if you think they are going to feed the finish, moisturize the wood, save the finish from checking, protect the finish from water, solvents, oxidation, light, heat or chemicals. They can not and do not do any of those things.

What polishes and waxes will do is help with scratch resistance, will add a temporary shine, can leave a pleasant scent in the room, can aid in dusting and will take money out of your wallet to feed the million dollar polish/wax industry.

Armor All on furniture!?! That's a first for me and I thought I'd heard/seen it all.
Sirspeedy said
as wood ages,it tends to dry out,and can change it'e properties
Not quite. Wood (we're not talking about green wood, here) reaches an equilibrium with its environment. Furniture wood in someone's home in Seattle will have higher moisture content than the same wood in a home in Santa Fe. The wood will be equally functional and long lasting in both cases. It's when wood goes through cycles of picking up moisture and expanding and then drying out and shrinking, because it lives in a climate with widely varying weather conditions, that one gets problems. Preventing the wood from being subjected to this cycle is one of the main purposes of a good finish.

Sirspeedy, I'm sure the loving care you give your speakers is worthwhile, but I believe you are repairing the finish itself (a la your comments about finish checking), not the wood underneath. Unless the finish was poor to begin with, the wood underneath is fine, as it is protected from the elements, as it were. Finishes are subjected to the elements, however, and olde-style finishes do age, lose moisture and resiliency. Modern finishes are pretty darn inert and only need to be kept clean. I'm in agreement with S7horton and Merganser. (I do think that an application of real Carnauba wax is useful some places; no furniture oils or polishes for me, though.)
Thanks,so much for this wonderful information.You fine gentleman have made some fine points,and I believe you have saved my knees from wearing out prematurely.Unless there is a polish for them,I'll lower my number of polish/buff cycles.

So,can I assume that,in lieu of having my stuff in a dedicated room,with a yearly humidity averaging 50%,and a consistent room temp,that I really don't need to do anything other than keeping all clean?

Thanks for all!