Strangest Box Material You used or Have Seen?

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If one is careful with the bracing, and one gets into a situation wher ethe panel resonantes (rare with music on my boxes) as long as the 2 subpanels are out of phase there is little output.

Constained damping works. But costs time & money. And if my cabinets don’t resonant then i see little point in guilding the lily.

Another trick is to load woofers in tightly coupled push-push so as to take advantage of active vibration cancelation… one gets dramatically lower box load. KEF does this in their Blades. As do a number of other makers.

dave

Thanks Dave. Have you done some accelerometer measurements on different techniques you employed? That is something I would like to play with.

I understand you have a commercial product so tinkering is not just a hobby for you.

I can get away with screwing around and not have to worry about the bottom line :)
 
music soothes the savage beast
Joined 2004
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I have built subwoofer our of concrete. Its still in use by my brother for 30+ years...

Built small boxes out of plaster reinforced by wire mesh. Nothing special.

Made lots of speakers from foam core ready board, layered together with gorilla glue, works great.

Made square box for midrange out of bathroom tiles, worked great.

Rest is usual stuff, ikea cutting boards, small aquarium, birdhouse, all sorts of pipes and sonotubes, you name it.
 
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I have built subwoofer our of concrete. Its still in use by my brother for 30+ years...

Built small boxes out of plaster reinforced by wire mesh. Nothing special.

Made lots of speakers from foam core ready board, layered together with gorilla glue, works great.

Made square box for midrange out of bathroom tiles, worked great.

Rest is usual stuff, ikea cutting boards, small aquarium, birdhouse, all sorts of pipes and sonotubes, you name it.


Cool! Way to break the mld :)
 
I agree with Dave's comments. Just makes so much sense to move the speaker basket vibration away to the rear panel. We once did a very "ear opening" exercise by epoxying thick ply to the back of a mid woof and running a bolt to the back panel. Was shocking how much of an improvement it made vs the normal screw attachment to the front baffle.
 
Cool! Way to break the mld :)

I agree with Dave's comments. Just makes so much sense to move the speaker basket vibration away to the rear panel. We once did a very "ear opening" exercise by epoxying thick ply to the back of a mid woof and running a bolt to the back panel. Was shocking how much of an improvement it made vs the normal screw attachment to the front baffle.


I may do this next go around. I would try a viscoelastic coupling though. It will transfer some energy to the back panel but it will be attenuated.
 

PRR

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Joined 2003
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...a truck load of shoe goo...

Your kidneys will curl-up and die.

Not actually "box", but I have used green insulating foam in a speaker build. I wanted a bass-mid box with an exponential front horn. I did not have fancy tools. I built the box of sheathing ply. I cut-up hard 3" polyu foam with holes to fill the 2'x2'x1' front space. I got in there with a rounded SurForm to work the holes into an exponential horn shape. Then I fiberglassed over.

Up close, it was mildly ugly, even with flat black paint. Out in the audience it had real good "throw" over 400Hz. I was young, and gradually realized that the exponential was not doing much good, and beamy. My next horn was pure pyramidical plywood. Covered a wider swath of the crowd and did not need as much EQ in the 200Hz-600Hz band where the narrower horn perked-up abruptly.
 
Your kidneys will curl-up and die.

Not actually "box", but I have used green insulating foam in a speaker build. I wanted a bass-mid box with an exponential front horn. I did not have fancy tools. I built the box of sheathing ply. I cut-up hard 3" polyu foam with holes to fill the 2'x2'x1' front space. I got in there with a rounded SurForm to work the holes into an exponential horn shape. Then I fiberglassed over.

Up close, it was mildly ugly, even with flat black paint. Out in the audience it had real good "throw" over 400Hz. I was young, and gradually realized that the exponential was not doing much good, and beamy. My next horn was pure pyramidical plywood. Covered a wider swath of the crowd and did not need as much EQ in the 200Hz-600Hz band where the narrower horn perked-up abruptly.

Thanks! I like my kidneys so I will not use shoe goo :)

Good job on that. Fun to play. That is what DIY is all about. Fun.
 
My current boxes are 3/4" birch ply, peel-n-seel roofing material and 1/2" birch ply braced with Texas Red Oak, but the strangest to me is the super strong concrete a buddy of mine used. You needed a dolly to move the things. He was a very strange dude. His listening room was literally perfectly treated to the point it was absurd.
 
In the 1980s, Townshend used a plaster-lined steel shell for their Glastonbury speakers, which used Jordan units. This was their last version:

BigEars Audio - townshend

Another company, Electrofluidics, used a polymer for their very heavy and inert cabinets

Lending itself more readily to DIY, the Musician Speaker (a Liverpool University-developed full-range driver from the 1980s) used an interesting cabinet technique. It was constructed of ceramic tiles with cork glued at the edges, holding the tiles together. The cork made the construction airtight and decoupled the tiles from each other. I don't recall if the tiles themselves were damped. The front baffle was formed by the full-range driver, which was mounted on a metal plate.
 
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Terracotta ... Off course Italians tried it

Ceramics - Terracotta speakers

quit nice looking actually

In Japan ... recycle car tyres

seal-recycled-tire-speaker-1.jpg


Here another one ... already thinking to do this for my sons room :)
 
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