Are exotic speaker cabinet materials overrated?

 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. 

If we take a look at all live venues we listen to music at none of them use any speakers that incorporate these exotic materials. Even orchestra halls where nothing is amplified the surrounding walls are mostly wood with other acoustical properties. I think the most natural resonance is some type of wood incorporated into an enclosure with some sort of dampening material. All materials have resonance but what ones are the most natural sounding and to me dead sounding speakers aren’t natural.