Rosenut?

I paid over $300 for quality Rosewood veneer- just the sheet, the actual wood, nothing more- barely enough to cover 4 subs or maybe a pair of floor standers.  $300 just for the raw material. Even given better pricing and incredibly efficient manufacture that still equates to at least $200, more like $300 or more by the time its on a finished speaker. Which then gets marked up at least 100% from wholesale to retail. 

Rosewood by the way is not a color, its a species of wood with its own distinctive patterns of color and grain, depending on how it was selected and sawn. Not that the average customer has even the slightest clue. Wood is like leather- most "leather" is bits of leather ground up and reconstituted and pressed and cut until it has more in common with paper than the hide of any animal. 

Some of which matters if like me you're building something. Or paying someone to build some for you. If you hire a guy to build you some Rosewood speakers and he tries to trick you with stained walnut I can see where you'd be steamed. I fail however to see how it matters if you're just shopping for speakers. Don't you just buy the ones that look and sound nice? Does it really matter what they call it?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Right?

It was a sled along along!

(Whoops...misread title...)

Guitar players "have a clue." I've owned a lot of solid rosewood (backs and sides) guitars, both Indian and the now protected Brazilian, and also have a newer guitar made of rosewood-ish looking (redder) cocobolo which is both fun to say and poisonous (look it up). I have an Indian rosewood Martin 000-28 that still smells like roses as it was unused and trapped in a case by the previous owner for 5 years before I bought it. That amazing smell is fading but I like it...it's good...I once picked up and examined a solid rosewood (body and neck) Fender Telecaster belonging to Delaney Bramlett when I was a stage hand for a Delaney and Bonnie show, finding out later that it was given to him by George Harrison who used it on "Let it Be"...Harrison's estate now owns it again. This concludes my rosewood trivia comments. 

Rosewood that smells like roses? Weird 

That's where the name "rosewood" came from...what? You thought it was the thorns?