BOENICKE audio writes: “We are one of less than a handful of companies who build their loudspeakers from solid wood. There is much Internet gossip that solid wood speakers are always built as resonating structures to try and imitate musical instruments. If someone took an actual look at the cross sections of our CNC-milled enclosures, they’d be quickly disabused of that notion. Our enclosures very clearly are not designed to act as resonating bodies. On the contrary, we try to make our enclosures as solid and nonresonant as possible
“So why then use natural wood?”
- The answer is very simple: First, if you mount a driver to a certain mass such as solid wood, MDF or aluminium, the inherent properties of that material will strongly affect how the driver sounds. This is a fact either virtually nobody seems to know about it or cares to respect for its consequences when designing a driver or loudspeaker.
- Almost all driver manufacturers know that using an aluminium phase plug can help to move heat out of the magnet system and eliminate the little echoic chamber behind the dust cap. Compared to a wooden phase plug, aluminium simply adds a gross coloration. That’s because to the human ear, aluminium is a highly coloured material. Second, there is no such thing as a 100% non-resonant enclosure. To some degree, sound energy will always dissipate from the enclosure itself. It seems evident that a body of solid wood with a thin coating of oil will resonate in a more natural way than the same body made from MDF then coated in shiny impervious plastic proudly sold as polyester lacquer.
- Our W13 is a perfect example of the benefits of solid wood enclosures. The W13 is heavy and extremely non resonant. Solid wood’s low degree of inner damping with only minimal amounts of extremely hard glue allows the speaker to reproduce music with so much true light in the harmonic structure of each tone that you first must hear it to even understand it.
