chris661 wrote:
Ohh, didn't realise that.
Good for marketting hype, I'd expect.
That it is Chris. Looks pretty, but that's about it as far as back loads go, except in some very particular cases.
Hmmm, I'll agree the design uses loads of material, I'm not sure about laminate direction being a weakness using multiple layers of plywood in such a design. I would expect, assuming good sheet bonding/bolting, very serious rigidity and cabinet density. Would be a bugger to lift
It's fine for the outer panels, but for thinner internal strips, for e.g. those that make up the front baffle, it can get rather flimsy & you start to run into some rather interesting resonance modes. I first learned of this when researching the armour of 19th century warships of all things, and their wooden backings. Translam is pretty, especially if perspex or toughened glass sides are used so you can see the internal form, but IMO it's not worth the effort.
The density side of things is a double-edged sword. Ideally, since you can't erradicate panel resonance, you want to push it outside the operating bandwidth (BW) of the box. When you try to go low, you need enormous thicknesses for a bass enclousre since panel Fs only drops to 0.707x that of a single thickness each time you double it. Worse, the lower the panel Fs, the higher the amplitude & wider the resonant BW becomes, so you end up needing huge amounts of damping. High mass is good for midrange enclosures though.
TBH, a lot of what I wrote above though is really pretentious. It's true enough, but once you get beyond a certain point, IMO life becomes too short (hifi wire anybody?
). The more I learn about speakers, the more I realise how little I actually know.