Are carbon fiber speaker cabinets inherently better than wood or metal ones


There seems to be a pretty big jump in speaker prices when moving to carbon fiber cabinetry when all else is equal (or what seems like equal). Is this because it is able to be molded into more acoustically correct shapes or simple the characteristics of the material?

sokogear

@lonemountain: Right you are! To see how NOT to build a speaker enclosure, look inside a Tekton (no offense owners of them. They have their strengths, but a non-resonant enclosure is not one of them).

Another cost-effective way to damp enclosure wall resonances is a product designed by and made for Danny Richie of GR Research: NoRez. It has a  damping layer (with self-stick adhesive for attaching to the wall) topped with a 1" thick layer of open cell foam.. For an even cheaper method, Danny recommends gluing heavy floor tiles onto the interior walls. That works especially well with open baffle loudspeakers, which don't need the foam layer.

Years ago I worked for Jon Dahlquist as a his rep in Chicago.  He developed a series of loudspeakers called DQM that used Magnat drivers inside a revolutionary cabinet (to me anyway) using a double wall of variable density MDF with a layer of Nextel sprayed in between these two sheets.  About as inert as I had experienced up until that point.  Was the late 80s I think??? Well ahead of most, the idea of using the best drivers possible and an inert box.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of an opinion without the discomfort of thought"  John F. Kennedy