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High end speaker construction - solid wood?

Dave, musical instruments and speakers are very different things. During the production of music, the harmonics and resonances are part of the music. Since they are already part of the recording, you don't want to add them again during reproduction.

Totally removing moisture doesn't make wood dimensionally stable, it just makes it more more difficult to seal up properly. You can send out chunks of wood to go through an acrylic injection process that removes moisture and replaces it with clear acrylic, but then it's not very much like wood, anymore outside of looks.

I've been toying with woodworking for close to 20 years and I'm no where near good enough to attempt to build a solid wood cabinet. I would anticipate a complete failure outside of attempting a heavily braced open baffle.
 
The enclosure material needs to be selected for function. What is needed is stiff material with a stiffness to weight ratio as high as possible (unless the designer wants to build heavy speakers that get difficult to move around and costly to ship).

20 years ago, birch plywood was considered to be the best material for high quality enclosures. Now it seems that MDF is much better and widely available (and much cheaper) giving better properties for less weight and much less cost.

The cabinet in a sealed or vented speaker system is merely for loading the woofers and providing a resonance free support for the drivers. Surely woodworking and finishing must be good as they are probably going to be placed in living rooms at houses were women live, but the sound comes out of the drivers and should only come out of the drivers - not a resonating baffle or panel.

Unfortunately, as most people can't appreciate or differentiate a high quality driver from a cheap one, and as most people can be stunned by good woodworking, many manufacturers are shifting the balance of attention from the calculations and driver selection towards cabinet design.
 
ROSSO said:
+1 The curved sides increase the section modulus (compared to flat). They would not have the same resonant frequency or propensity to "drum" as a flat panel.
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+2 very good point, those were my first thoughts ( from a cabinet makers point of view). Some thing tells me that they done there home work on this one.
 
oldskl said:
+2 very good point, those were my first thoughts ( from a cabinet makers point of view). Some thing tells me that they done there home work on this one.
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I bet with all that work, it performs almost as well as MDF and looks as good as a nicely veneered MDF cabinet. :)
 
I put up a thread about this a while back, as I had started wondering the same thing (I think it was here, but I'm not sure). I think I had recently-scored my Wharfedales, and I was looking them over and noticed that the sides were not made of solid-oak or something like that, and I thought to myself, "Gee (Well, I didn't say "Gee", but), Wharfedales are supposed to be good speakers - Why wouldn't they use a solid wood?". But people explained why, and now I get it.

I'm a guitarist, and there are lots of so-called "tone-woods" that are used for it's sonic characteristics - mahogany (Warm upper-mids - great sustain - Used for Les Paul bodies, usually in conjuction with a maple top), maple (Lots of Strat-style guitars have been built with it - Brighter tone than mahogany), alder (Fender built Stratocasters mostly out of maple, alder, or ash - Similar tones, but they do have slight sonic differences), etc. etc.. Guitar makers also use woods like rosewood for acoustic guitars, but they also use it for fretboards on both electric AND acoustic guitars (Brazilian rosewood is the holy grail of fretboard woods - If you see a guitar where the entire neck/fretboard is made out of a single piece of Brazilian rosewood, you know you're looking at one expensive guitar - $5000 and up, usually). Lots of woods are used for their sonic signature.

However, after hearing peoples' explanations about speaker woods and why it's best to use a neutral-sounding wood (that's also stable), I totally-understand why speaker companies have been using plywood , MDF, and that sort of thing for the last 60+ years. It makes sense now. You're trying to reproduce a performance, as opposed to being a part of that performance and coloring it in some way. Probably-best to leave that up to the musicians.

Hey, how come there's only 1 tube in that "Perfect Pair Tubes" ad at the top of most pages? What happened to the other one?
 
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I generally agree that solid wood is a difficult speaker building material. However, don't doubt the good folks at Sonus Faber. Man, those are some sweet-sounding speakers.
 
jocko_nc said:
I generally agree that solid wood is a difficult speaker building material. However, don't doubt the good folks at Sonus Faber. Man, those are some sweet-sounding speakers.
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Yeah, I'm afraid to even look up the prices for some of those things, let alone ever envision buying a new pair. But where would the world be without dreamers? Probably full of Thruster devotees, that's what.
 
What if all that cost allocated to treating solid wood was saved using MDF and redirected to even better drivers and a true active design?
 
Wood works great if you do it like they are. Narrow pieces with opposing grain.
Some buy wide boards and rip them and flip them so the wood will oppose itself.

Woodworking experts tend to say nothing over 4" wide but I have seen old piano's with 12" wide slices of wood and they are still straight. One day I'll probably pick up a craigslist free pianoone just for the lumber.
There is a madnolin maker in southern Ohio who uses old piano wood for his craft. He claims wood that old is extremely stable and from what I have read about lumber he is correct.

I've taken a lot of consoles and organs apart. Most of those that had tube gear in them had laminated wood, the solid state gear was laminated MDF or Particle board.

One of the reasons for the switch to mdf/ plywood for speaker cabinents beside the price has to due with the grain, trees are no longer allowed to grow for hundreds of years so the grain is not as tight.

My home is over 100 years old and the pine floors have a wood grain spaced about as close to each other as a carpenter pencil would draw lines without touching. You'll have to look hard to find pine like that nowadays. Its still out there though.

I do have a Altec Lansing Series 7 cabinent and 2 Series 9 Cabinents that look like they used solid wood on the sides, top and bottom. It is possible they laminated it and if so it is one of the best laminations I have seen.

Once you properly seal wood that has been dried it will not move.

I make my speakers out of plywood. Preferably furniture grade since it has fewer voids.
But;
I've used exterior grade pine for some projects and presently my 1 cubic foot box, 1.5 cubic box and 2 cubit foot test boxes are made out of what ever the plywood was that I pulled out of a dumpster. Those are over 10 years old as are my first set of voigt pipes I made out of 1/2" exterior grade pine plywood. It was so rough I gave up sanding them smooth and used plaster to smooth the exterior up. :)

I make and sell replacement computer speakers made out of 5/8" T 111 exterior plywood. People like the rough texture. Lots of waste though since I don't use the milled grooves in my projects. Some may say 5/8 is too thin but with a dimension of
20" tall 5" wide and 6" deep plus the internal baffle nothing moves. I even own a set of stage monitors I made out of 1/2" plywood. Now those have a resonance haha

I will be making some 4" driver folded voigt pipes out of Oak this summer. Why solid wood? Because I can use a 45 degree locked mitre bit on the corners or even dovetail joints. I could learn to laminate but I like nice wood. If there is 1 flaw about my speakers it is that when I use plywood I can always see the layers somewhere.
I'm pretty good with my router and can get the wood trimed to that top ply and match those up but it is a PITA and the grain is not correct (if it has a grain) and the stain doesn't match.

As for the "sound" quality, I've yet to put my ear to any speaker cabinent and not hear sound. You just don't want to hear any low mids to highs.

True MDF, you really need special bits to work with that stuff. Most of the MDF you get at the chain lumber yards is not furniture quality. Still decent stuff but if your going to make a lot of projects you better buy the bits and power tools designed for it.
Most of the modern gear I have taken apart is not MDF, MDF is powder, most of the speakers I take apart is particle board. (not to be confused with chip board)

The last bass cabinent I built the sides were 3/4" MDF that had a fiberglass coating on one side. It doesn't sound any different then the second one that was built out of 3/4" plywood.

So, in my opinion, a properly sealed and dampened cabinent is what matters.
Build some speakers, once you do, you will quit buying them.


Safety Warning;
Always wear a good quality dust mask while working with wood. Carpenters have the highest rate of lung cancer. It isn't the stuff you sweep up, its that haze you see after you run your router or table saw. I got serious about woodworking 3 years ago and spent a winter in my garage making lots of speakers. I noticed it, did some research on it.
Now everything I own is on wheels and I move it outside to cut or join. Keeps the my lungs and the inside of the garage a lot cleaner.
 
Yea, a router working in MDF is a dust particle storm.

I heard two pair of smaller Sonus Fabers in a high-end store in Atlanta years ago. They stopped me in my tracks.
 
The "much better" is debatable. As far as weight. Every piece of 3/4 MDF I ever used is noticably heavier than a same sized piece of 18mm Baltic birch.
Even disregarding the dust issues, the worked required to finish MDF has led me to quit using it.


SaSi said:
Now it seems that MDF is much better and widely available (and much cheaper) giving better properties for less weight and much less cost.
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All speculation behind... I spent an afternoon with a pair of beautifully crafted Sonus Faber (forgot model name) all solid wood and they sounded horrible. I gave them a serious chance to impress, Try them in 2 rooms, 2 systems. My B&W 805 Matrix (made of MDF) ate them for lunch. :)
 
fastbike said:
The "much better" is debatable. As far as weight. Every piece of 3/4 MDF I ever used is noticably heavier than a same sized piece of 18mm Baltic birch.
Even disregarding the dust issues, the worked required to finish MDF has led me to quit using it.
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MDF has more mass than ply. High grade plywood is stiffer.
 
AngelRa said:
All speculation behind... I spent an afternoon with a pair of beautifully crafted Sonus Faber (forgot model name) all solid wood and they sounded horrible. I gave them a serious chance to impress, Try them in 2 rooms, 2 systems. My B&W 805 Matrix (made of MDF) ate them for lunch. :)
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It's refreshing to hear a critique of them from somebody who has actually heard them, instead of blind speculation.
 
Certainly wood can be selected and treated to be nearly inert and almost entirely stable, MDF will always be cheaper.
 
JohnVF said:
It's refreshing to hear a critique of them from somebody who has actually heard them, instead of blind speculation.
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I've heard 2 pairs of Sonus Fabers and they sounded very good to me. Never compared them directly to anything else, gut instinct is that I didn't find B&W 803s significantly better or worse. They don't rate amongst the best I've heard, but they sounded good enough that if I did spring for them, it woulnd't be purely based on their beauty.
 
dnewma04 said:
I've heard 2 pairs of Sonus Fabers and they sounded very good to me. Never compared them directly to anything else, gut instinct is that I didn't find B&W 803s significantly better or worse. They don't rate amongst the best I've heard, but they sounded good enough that if I did spring for them, it woulnd't be purely based on their beauty.
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My brother had a similar experience. He listen to a set of S.F. and he like it. But the set he auditioned was larger.
 
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