plastics vs wood

[fisheye]

Any opinions concerning plastic enclosed speakers vs ones with wooden enclosures? Does it make a difference?

 

Without any factual knowledge, I have the feeling wood enclosed speakers have a nicer character than plastic ones. Like tubes have a nicer character when distorted than transtors. Maybe I'm wrong and plastics have only advantages, such as less weight.

 

Opinions anyone?

[Dave Horne]

While wood might be considered 'natural' by most, plastic would seem to be inert and immune to changes in humidity and temperature which, I think, would be an advantage. I would also guess that plastic would be easier to work with and to achieve more uniform results.

 

This discussion brought to mind a friend of my wife. This woman 'practices' homeopathy and prefers things 'natural'; she prefers not to warm up her tea in a microwave as she considers microwaves unnatural. . She has had breast implants, her teeth whitened and her eyes tucked. I guess the definition of 'natural' depends on your outlook. I personally don't care what the materials used for sound equipment are as long as the equipment performs well. (Of course, since I use Bose 802s, my choice would be plastic. My Sony headphones are also plastic.) Sorry ... just rambling.

[ITGITC]

Fisheye, ideally you want an enclosure made of a material that has very little resonance of its own - like a cement block. Rap your knuckles against a cement block and you won't hear any resonance ringing. It's dead.

 

But, of course, carrying around speakers made of cement would get tiresome very fast.

 

Medium density fiberboard is often used by high-end concert speaker manufacturers such as EAW (www.eaw.com) and Meyer Sound (www.meyersound.com) for its strength and low-resonance properties. Void-free cross-grain laminated Baltic birch plywood finished in black polyurethane is used in the EAW FR-153z speakers that I own and use for PA/Keyboards. They're not lightweight though.

 

I think the choice of transducers and crossovers probably make more of a difference than the choice of fiberboard, birch, or plastic as the enclosure material. Wood seems to be preferred over plastic, but plastic is lighter in weight. As I get older, light weight is a strong selling point for me. I'm pretty sure this is the reason for the popularity of the plastic speakers. I own a JBL EON 15-PAK that I use as a keyboard monitor. It doesn't sound bad, but the treble could be a bit smoother.

 

The bottom line is that all speakers are a compromise. You have to give up something: weight, size, accuracy, SPL, and/or expense. I used to think that the best solution was a smaller speaker with a subwoofer. These can sound really good, but many people like to crank up the sub too loud and the sound can get ugly fast.

 

Mackie is about to introduce the SRM350 . I wonder if using two of these for my personal keyboard monitors, along with a subwoofer (or not) might be the best compromise for a decent sound that is not too heavy. I'll have to hear them to decide because if they don't sound good, who cares how light they are?

 

Disclaimer: Your Mileage May Vary. Speaker selection is a very subjective topic. Go listen to 'em and make up your own mind.

 

Is There Gas In The Car?

[Botch.]

Two words: Ovation Guitars.

 

The sound-producing surface, either the guitar face (wood) or the speaker cone, does the vibrating; the backing enclosure only serves to do just that, form an enclosure for a constant air volume. As stated by the previous posters, the weight and durability of the plastic is an advantage, with no real disadvantages to speak of. (Note, this argument doesn't really apply to the violin family, as both front and back vibrate together via the sound post).

[fisheye]

Thanks guys, good to clear that up.

 

Now if they just designed those plastic speakers with some more taste... Well I guess I don't have the luxury to chose my speakers on cosmetics.

 

The SRM350 promised to be nice things, but since Mackie lost RCF it's not clear if they are going to sound like their big brothers. Do you think they'll be better than Barbetta Sona 31c? (of course this is very subjective, but still interesting).

[ITGITC]

Originally posted by fisheye:

The SRM350 promised to be nice things, but since Mackie lost RCF it's not clear if they are going to sound like their big brothers. Do you think they'll be better than Barbetta Sona 31c? (of course this is very subjective, but still interesting).

Ooooooooh, that's a very good question, Mr. Fisheye! Who knows what's going to happen to Mackie in the near future? Why has there been such a delay in bringing the SRM350 to market? With Mackie, Tapco, and now Onyx, is LOUD Technologies spreading themselves too thin? Is their aquisition of EAW proving to be a good thing for them... or not? Where are they going to aquire transducers without RCF and will retain the quality? Will the quality of all their products suffer with these changes?

 

I wish the best for these folks, but it seems to me that these are important questions that are begging for answers before musicians and stockholders lose faith in what used to be a very promising company.

 

Is There Gas In The Car?

[JonLord]

Plastic is stronger resisting to the climate and umidity... But it looks that the plastic speakers have a lot of "vibrations" that can be dangerous to some eletronical components.

For example: a friend left his plastic speaker exactly beside his CD Player for a period of 2 years, and he used to hear it in loud levels. There was no space between the speakers and the player... Then, the vibrations of the speaker broke the reader of his CD Player forever. I think that those vibrations may affect also the internal pieces of the speaker.

Other thing... One of my keyboards, my old Yamaha PSR-510, get some vibrations on its speaker when you play it loud... And then you can hear the sound of the plastic front of the speaker continuosly knocking something very fastly.

Is interesting to check also that, in keyboards, the design of the speaker make the quality of sound to be better or worst.

 

(Wow, that was hard to write all this in english, I'd bet that I had some gramatical mistakes)