Are exotic speaker cabinet materials overrated?

@tcutter You are hitting at the real issue. Those who make wholesale condemnation of something they do not understand or ever experienced. 

I have had the pleasure of listening to many speaker designs and cabinet materials over the years. To call speaker made of granite, aluminum or other materials "ridiculous" when you have never listened to them is well ridiculous. 

Now I have never had the pleasure to hear a pair of concrete speaker cabinets yet I am not opposed to them nor do I completely dismiss the theory of the material having positive acoustic attributes. 

I have also had the displeasure of listening to 100's of cheap wooden boxes with transducers stuffed into them that well sounded like crap. Sorry a $500 speaker sounds just like that a $500.00 speaker not a $10,000.00 Sonner Legato Duo, or a pair of Aluminum Magicos.....

 but you still need a wood cabinet to reproduce the sound of wood instruments.
 

See now I think you are just having us on. Surely no one really thinks that. If you stand by that comment, everything else you say is suspect.

Using your logic, a cabinet of wood cannot reproduce brass instruments. See how silly that is?

Yeah, that was not true, to put it mildly. 

But the subject of resonance is an interesting one. We do want to tune our listening rooms, don't we ? Speakers/room can be thought of as a unit.

The drivers produce most of the sound (brass, wood, metal). The cabinet, like subwoofers, adds to some of the color and feel that’s lost in the recording. It’s like playing music at low volume and leaving the cabinet out of the equation. It does not feel realistic. Open baffle has a weakness in bass. It relies on the room to produce the bass, which is not the same as me playing bass in the living room and generating it from a localized area.

btw wood is not perfect either. If I push the bass, the bass guitar for example can sound woody on thick boards and hollow on thin boards. You can argue aluminum or concrete is a better fit for that type music.

I left wood back in the 80s and have no regrets. I simply found other speakers to my liking that didn't incorporate it. I'll add that I thought the best sounding speakers at last April's Axpona were the Acoras  and I almost bought a pair of Giya G2 S2, which is a wood-fiberglass hybrid. I also like Wilson Benesch's elegant solution to resonance using fiber composites.