Why are there so many wooden box speakers out there?

To be less flippant, your assertion that a sphere is somehow "perfect" is fundamentally in error. ALL designs, including spheres, are engineering tradeoffs.

Its not my assertion olson did the damn research back in the 1950. All shapes were compared and the sphere had the smoothest response. Nothing has changed since then so the result is still true.

Look at it this way, even if the U.S. military wanted to spend a BILLION dollars developing a "good" speaker, they could most certainly do that. But in no way would it be "perfect". Such an animal will never exist.

We are not talking about perfection. We are simply saying why are all speakers wooden boxes when the research has shown that they should be spherical?

"We are simply saying why are all speakers wooden boxes when the reserach has shown that they should be spherical? "

Now, what research are you referring to? Can you provide a link? 

@dill 

yes heres a link

@kenjit

yes here’s a link

Interesting how close the two 'truncated pyramid and parallelepiped’ examples were to the sphere. And better than the hemisphere. Andrew Jones should be stoked.

But note the somewhat limited scope of measurement: 100-4000 Hz and single point microphone. A good start but you’d probably take the investigation further. Interesting also that the discussion focusses on diffraction rather than internal dynamics.

We also have to consider the compromises involved in full-range or co-axial driver implementations. The former especially with respect to suitable SPL and dynamics, the latter with complex diffraction from the drivers.

Look at KEF Blade for example: co-axial treble/mid but separate bass drivers to achieve sufficient dynamics in the lower octaves (Devialet adhere more closely to the sphere but take a similar approach).

@Kenjit:
Who was this speaker designer? Can you show us how and why he/she reached these conclusions?