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Is Solid Wood Good for Speaker Building? Head to Head Testing - DIY vs Elac



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My solid wood speaker build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlBuJhMSmcI

Upgrading the speaker: https://youtu.be/JmKKEVgMqis

The notable difference between these two speakers is that the Elac is vented and mine is sealed, and that has an effect on the amount of bass each can produce The measurement starts from 30Hz, so it's a factor but in my opinion a small one, since mine has a bigger woofer.
I would guess that the Elac is braced, but the panels are probably 1/2" thick. The panels in mine (other than the back panel which is 1/2" Baltic birch) are 3/4" thick. There isn't any bracing in mine, but it is stuffed (not heavily) with fiberglass.
Remember that what we are looking at in these measurement is how much the panels are vibrating. Don't confuse that with sound. The vibrating panel produces some sound, but it will be very low and almost impossible to measure since the speaker will swamp it out. The peaks in the measurements look big because the accelerometer is able to pick them out and plot them on the computer.
Regarding stuffing: it is a damping material. It doesn't have the ability to chose whether it will damp the airspace only, or the panels only - it does both at the same time. The more you put in, the more it will damp both the airspace inside the box and the panels. My measurement setup in the last video shows how effective each one is at damping by weight, and this is not something you can do by measuring with a microphone. There might be an obvious difference, but you can't see which one performs the best.
Stuffing can be used in vented boxes - the Elac featured in the video has stuffing inside. The key thing is to not block the vent with the stuffing. A vented box is just a Helmholtz resonator, where the volume of air in the box resonates and that sound exits the port. The tuning of that resonance is determined by the volume of the box (affected by the amount of stuffing) and the length and diameter of the port. There is no airflow involved. The air that pumps in and out of the port is the cone moving in and out, not the sound that the port produces to reinforce the bottom end of the bass range. People often confuse sound with airflow, when they are different things altogether.

Recorded samples from my listening position: https://youtu.be/4aKJpLTPXAk

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Audio
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