Every object has a resonance. Heavier and denser wood is liable all things being equal to act better under the circumstances we care about here. But guess what if you apply Sorbothane and/or dynamat to any headphone frame you are going to decrease resonances.
a segway. how does the type of wood affect speaker cabinets? I know a lot of people build stuff out of laminated MDF cause it’s CHEAP, but dunno how it is for sound quality benefit / enhancement vs. other woods.
I would say that the cabinet design is 30-50% of how the speaker actually preforms imo. It really varies by design and manufacturing
Again the goal is to reduce the vibrations from the material, MDF is actually not a terrible material for Speakers.
Most designs are based around ideal none resonant cabinets, lengths, sizes of port and port depths all matter.
The cabinet design is fairly important when it comes to the final sound, and working with the material and understanding how it affects the sound is very important as you say. There are great MDF speakers and there are pretty poor MDF speakers. It really depends on the overall design
Yes speakers (with the exceptions of things like big Electrostatic drivers) are fundamentally just resonance tubes, drivers matter, but so does the shape of the air around them.
There are some quite clever tricks designers use to change resonant frequencies, some bass drivers include passive second drivers to damp resonant fequencies, so they don’t need massive boxes to get the speaker to reproduce low bass frequencies.
Yeah, I’ve seen some really impressive designs and the engineers have tried to explain it to be but some of the stuff just goes over my head lol. It’s pretty impressive what they can do
MDF - in particular the thick stuff is superb for speakers. Cross bracing helps.
The room is more important then speaker enclosures except for terrible enclosures. Excepting panel speakers only the woofer has to be in a cabinet unless you want to go baffleless which I don’t like. Any driver that has output over 400 Hz can be mounted without a baffle. Lots of designs from the 80’s did that. My ribbon speakers are mounted w/o a baffle. midrange drivers are tuned to need a baffle (sometimes very small compared to the woof battle, and sometimes fire into insulation (Dahlquist DQ-10) or a small cabinet.
I was just assuming the room was more than adequate in that case, as I agree it’s pretty hard to judge a speaker in a poor room. I am making to pull out all the stops for room treatment for my new project
when get down to the root of the matter, the answer is, ’ because science!’
Pretty much yeah. I would just look at what you are buying as a whole and not really focus in on one aspect. Designs will act differently and it’s the overall final product that counts
I heard a domed room is best for speakers, is that true?
I mean it depends on the placement and the speakers for what room would sound the best. It’s really hard to tell. If you buy speakers make sure you are able to return them or demo them in your own home, as all rooms are different and may act differently. Also depends on how you treat the room too
Rooms act like big resonance boxes, your not just hearing the sound wave from the speaker travelling to your ears, but also the ones that bounce off the walls on the way. The aren’t generally desirable because they are off axis from the speaker and they take longer to get to your ears, so they reinforce and cancel certain frequencies.
So certain points in a room the audio will sound different.
The general solution if you have a dedicated room is to spot treat, you identify which modes are having the undesirable effect and stick something to diffuse or absorb the sound at the points of refection.
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I used to do rooms for audio (2 channel). What are the dimensions, flooring, walls made of. location of windows, doors, closets, built in furniture?
I still have some of my ASC tube traps and sound flags in case I move into a bigger space sometime again.
It’s not completely finalized yet, as I don’t have the addition built yet lol, I have to wait until winter ends. I hired a studio designer and they are working on a final design. It’s going to essentially be designed for the speakers I am going to use as my main monitors and also make it a flexible space. It’s also going to have a separate recording room that’s going to mainly be multipurpose
Sounds good. Do you use vinyl? Which speakers? My last room was great for Verity Parsifals, Magnepan 3.7i, ML CLS IIz.
I personally am not a big vinyl fan tbh. If you are curious to see what I have atm you can check my profile. I mainly have a very large digital music collection. I would like to start getting into reel to reel though. Also more into headphones than speakers at this point
Good, vinyl is tough on wood floors, even wall mounts tend to be crummy.
Thanks, I’ll check our your profile.