I just bought a beautiful sounding pair of open baffle speakers (Pure Audio Project Duet 15 Horn 1) that beg the question, "what box?" Efficient, upgradeable, and the money I saved by not buying Rockports or Magicos allowed me to buy a ski house and a Ferrari.
Are exotic speaker cabinet materials overrated?
Seems a lot of speaker companies are coming out with new non resonant cabinet materials all the time. Wilson especially seems to be inventing a new M X V material every year. Other top speaker companies seem to be staying with MDF even when their speakers match the above mentioned speaker company prices. Do these exotic materials really contribute to a better sound or do they add an unnatural quality to the sound.
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Always not to be overlooked is the fact, the Speaker is typically designed for and then tested in a space that far from represents a home living space. A very controlled space is used where amplitude from formed sound is experienced once only. A home space will send an unadulterated amplitude and resend the same amplitude quite adulterated with a variety of corruptionss. The listener in a home typically never hears what is the actual design for a Speaker, only a lesser version of the End Sound Capability is to be heard and assessed. Speaker recommendations are very very precarious for this very reason. Quality designs for a Cabinet, do assist with Driver generated amplitude being the only audible amplitude within the listening space. |
@wolf_garcia ... congrats on the "ski house", I'm sure the view is spectacular. |
Speaker manufacturers go to great lengths to measure resonance with laser interferometors and very sophisticated doppler instruments. Then reviewers give the box the knuckle rap test. Go figure. Some of the most solid materials like aluminum in a Magico speaker are very heavy and difficult to bring into a typical home and move around to find a good sweet spot balance. An interesting tidbit on the Yamaha NS-5000 speakers made with Hokkaido Birch is that when they sent the wood to Malaysia where they are made in the same factory that makes pianos, the wood warped. They had to fix that production issue, which they did. I found that on the forest product company's website after a very deep google dive. The piano black lacquer finish also helps controls the resonance. Whether the wood serves the same function in the speaker as it does in a piano or wood musical instrument that Yamaha makes is unclear. In the end, the final sound is tuned by ear and there are numerous things that affect that outcome obviously. |
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