Are exotic speaker cabinet materials overrated?

Manufactures have been switching to lighter, thinner enclosure materials which makes lots of sense when they include the costs to ship their speakers to vendors or drop ship them to customers. They've taken advances copied from the British to make enclosure resonances consonant with those generate buy the drivers while they're reproducing music. The British took this approach because the BBC needed monitors to be light weight and mobile for onsite field applications.

Realistically in the home environment enclosure resonances aren't as important or obvious under most circumstances as listeners want to believe. Instead, engineers design them with heavier and more ridged materials or radiuses where they're needed, lightweight braces in strategic locations and in addition specifically placed damping materials along encloser walls (bitumen or tar) where they've detected uncontrolled resonances during the development phase.

@hiendmmoe I don't know about ALL their speakers, but Focal Stella Utopia EM Evos are made from MDF with laminated outer finishes per The Absolute Sound review. I think you'll find that's the most common with nearly all mass-produced speaker brands. MDF and HDF are just so much easier to work with and produces some of the best measuring enclosures there are. Before Klippel scanners and accelerometer software, designers just kinda "overbuilt" cabinets. (Think of bridges or older buildings. Yes, you can build a speaker out of Bubinga but you don't need to.) With the advent of better manufacturing tools and testing software (i.e. not needing to invest in an anechoic chamber), manufacturers can test for unwanted resonance in any material. Also worth mentioning is probably over 90% of speakers are built to a price point and include compromises. Cabinet material that never sees the light of day is one of those compromises. 

This all helps keep the glue companies in business not to mention the spray painters...very high tech. easier to use the crossover to toss out on wanted frequencies so as not to have screw with cabinet shape....which makes buyers uncomfortable. 

@nondemo prety sure they're HDF but they're not 1/4" thick like cheap speakers.

@gdaddy1 you described a concert piano on stage without a cage and lid or a cello without a bout and sound holes!

Enclosed speakers ARE instruments. They are enclosures used to channel sound like an oboe vs a saxophone.

I don’t believe ’unwanted’ resonance is the same as zero resonance. How popular are concrete or aluminum piano and cello? Wood has a warm sound people like.

Recordings are not perfect. You still need to restore some of what’s lost, like the sound and resonances of wood instruments. I’ll save my final judgement when I hear it, but I can’t imagine an echo box concrete speaker to reproduce the warmth  and resonance of wood instruments.

Maybe an open baffle or magnapan is more your thing. I would still want the sound of wood, just not cheap thin wood.