Are exotic speaker cabinet materials overrated?

@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.

@foggyus91  Are you suggesting George Short is an armchair audio engineer and speaker designer?

His cabinet handbook was written for home DIY speaker construction and assumed typical limitations and access to tools and supplies available to home shops. While not practical to try and obtain and machine materials such as honeycomb laminates or synthetic marble etc., he felt hobbyist could still build superior cabinets using bench top tools that exceed what commercial speaker manufacturers could offer.

Exotic speaker material is hardly new either; I still own a pair of A/D/S CM7 speakers from the late 1980's that were made of some type of resin concrete composite material. Very nice speakers but not as good as the NCM kits I have built including Vision Signatures including the center channel, Okara II stand mounts and the 18-inch Leviathan Subwoofer. I have built many other subwoofer enclosures using the same principles and they are all built to standards equal to and likely beyond any commercially available construction.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030412105145/http://www.northcreekmusic.com/Vision/VisionInfo.htm

@george_r    +1

It's an excellent source of information and still yields a far superior box. It does require some skill and a basic understanding of what the end goal achievement is.

@george_r No you made that assumption. Stay in your lane. 

@bartsw 

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

Sorry, but that's just not true. The only thing reproducing sound should be the electrical speaker driver and the mechanical port. Other than that,the speaker box is NOT designed to add anything or resonate in any way and should be as acousticalley invisable as possible.

I bet those concrete, rounded speakers sound amazing! They also  measure really well.