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Veneers & other finishes.


kimberley

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Related in many ways to the recent enquiry about bitumen damping pads & how they might affect sound, has anyone - or any groups - evaluated differences in sound between different cabinet finishes?

Solid wood is said to be more 'acoustically transparent' than MDF, while veneering MDF should provide a further barrier to sound transmission - indeed some 'speaker manufacturers advertised the virtues of veneering inside surfaces, too, or used Formica to enhance 'deadness'.

The original AR brochures list different veneers (on wood or on MDF?) and also 'unfinished pine' - presumably the plain timber. Have any of these finishes been found to be audibly superior?

Adam Kimberley

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Related in many ways to the recent enquiry about bitumen damping pads & how they might affect sound, has anyone - or any groups - evaluated differences in sound between different cabinet finishes?

Solid wood is said to be more 'acoustically transparent' than MDF, while veneering MDF should provide a further barrier to sound transmission - indeed some 'speaker manufacturers advertised the virtues of veneering inside surfaces, too, or used Formica to enhance 'deadness'.

The original AR brochures list different veneers (on wood or on MDF?) and also 'unfinished pine' - presumably the plain timber. Have any of these finishes been found to be audibly superior?

Adam Kimberley

Dear Adam,

In a double-blind listening test, you probably couldn't tell the difference in sound between any AR speaker (or any other brand) in different cabinet finishes -- if your dear life depended on it. You might hear a slightly different sound when you rap your knuckles on the side of an Unfinished Pine Utility cabinet AR-3a and an Oiled-Walnut MDF cabinet, but in truth each cabinet is heavily braced inside, so the audible differences just aren't there.

There were never any solid-wood cabinets ever used in the larger bookshelf or floor-standing cabinets made by companies such as AR, KLH, Advent or Allison, etc. KLH used solid-stock Walnut on the tiny Model Eight table radio speaker, only because it was cheaper in the day to get solid-stock Walnut panels than to get the special small-dimension Walnut-veneered plywood panels. AR also used this with the AR Turntable originally, but all that changed when small-thickness veneered plywood (5/8-inch, etc.) became readily available.

Solid-stock panels large enough to be used in speaker construction (e.g., large enough for the panels in an AR-3a, for example) would be very susceptible to splitting and cracking, and thus have poor dimensional stability. The solid wood looks wonderful, but it is totally impractical for this application.

--Tom Tyson

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