I think some speakers use the grills for tuning, such as the metal grills on the Paradigm Persona lineup.
My Yamaha NS5000 have metal grills, and they only serve as protection.
I guess it depends on the speaker.
Are Metal Speaker Grilles an Issue?
I'm asking this almost rhetorically since I see these on high end speakers like Martin Logans, but I'm designing a home theater setup from scratch, and I'm going to custom CNC some aluminum speaker grilles for this setup.
As such, before I go through the process I just figured I'd ask my fellow audiophiles their feelings on metal speaker grilles. These won't be sitting directly atop the speaker, more like a few inches away from the speaker and are more of an aesthetic piece (and to some degree, a quasi security feature against children!).
But I've got a CNC machine so I can make them to any spec. Anything I should be mindful of when milling them so that I'm not absolutely destroying the sound quality of the speakers behind them? I'm willing to deal with a little bit of loss but don't want to overlook something really obvious that I coudl have designed around.
And before anyone asks, no, I'm not thinking about using a different material. The material is metal, the question is how best to use it.