Best Wood for Speakers

Woodworking covers a broad range of applications, including anything and everything that you can possibly think of to create from wood. With that being the case, there are craftsmen, DIYers, or hobbyists who make all sorts of things out of wood, from knick-knacks to boats, even speaker cabinets for their sound systems. 

Few woodworkers ever bother making their own speaker cabinets, but it’s not that uncommon a thing to make. It has also brought up the question of the best wood to use to make cabinets. Different people have had different opinions about this, at one time or another, so I set about to try and quantify which type of wood would be the best to choose. 

In this guide, I’ve tested three different materials to see which is the best wood to use for speaker cabinets. Let’s begin!

Wood Types I’ve Used

For my testing, I chose three different materials:

Maple 

I wanted a hardwood and maple had a tight, fine, straight grain, which I thought would work well for speaker cabinets. It’s a domestic hardwood, so the price is reasonable. It’s also fairly hard and dense, with a Janka hardness of 1450.

MDF

Many commercial speakers are with MDF cabinets, especially ones that are priced lower. MDF has replaced particle board as the material of choice when low-cost sheet wood products are wanted. 

If you’re looking for a budget option, MDF is definitely the way to go. However, it doesn’t stand up well to water. So, if there’s any chance that the speakers will be in the rain, avoid MDF.

Plywood 

A lot of speaker cabinets have been made of plywood through the years, including some that I’ve made myself. Plywood is inexpensive and dimensionally stable, but it tends to have voids in it. 

Those can affect the sound that the speaker produces, causing buzzing and distortion, although it might not be noticeable to the average person. I used standard construction plywood, due to availability issues; but marine-grade plywood or applewood is better, as it is void-free.

 

Making Speaker Cabinets for Home vs. Professional Use

To clarify which speakers or speaker cabinets I’ll discuss in this article and the accompanying video, I’ll be talking about one of two uses. The first one is for home audio use; for those who like to listen to music at home. Second is what I’ll refer to as the “garage band”; a small band that you might have, and the speaker you’ll take to play gigs from time to time.

There are a few basic differences in what you might need from speakers in these two cases. In the case of home audio, you’re going to want quality sound reproduction, in an attractive case, which matches your home’s furnishings. To accomplish that, you might veneer your speaker cabinets with some sort of hardwood veneer.

You wouldn’t want to take those same speakers out with your garage band, however. Moving those in and out of venues would probably make that nice hardwood-veneered case look rather beat up and ragged after a few months. 

You’ll want your speakers to be much more rugged, being able to handle more volume. That means making your speakers out of material that can take abuse, and covering it with a nappy sort of carpeting, as commercial sound system speakers are often covered. You’d also want to cover the corners with metal or plastic corner protectors, for those inevitable bumps and drops.

Testing speakers isn’t easy and generally requires a fairly complex and complete audio lab. I don’t have that equipment—just my workshop. Nevertheless, I’ve been a woodworker for a lot of years, and I’ve been an audio technician in the past, running sound for events, so I have some knowledge about this issue. 

I’ve even made a number of speaker systems (a speaker cabinet with one or more speakers mounted in it, often with a crossover network) at one time or another, mostly to save money.

Thus, for the sake of this test, I’ve made three speaker cabinets, all the same, out of the three materials mentioned above. These were made at the same time and in the same way, with the intent of them being as identical, except for the type of wood. All three contain the same five-inch, dual-cone speaker element.

The following tests I ran on these speakers were intended to show, as much as possible, whether or not there would be any difference in the sound and usefulness realized out of the three.

 

Weight

The first test was to weigh the speakers, as built. Since the speaker elements were the same, the only weight difference should be the weight of the wood used to make them. All three were made of ¾” thick stock, so the weight applies directly to the wood’s density. Theoretically, the denser the wood, the better it will avoid vibration.

• Maple – 3 lbs. 0.2 oz.
• Plywood – 3 lbs. 10.4 oz.
• MDF – 4 lbs. 4.4 oz.

The MDF is clearly heavier than either of the other two, with plywood coming in second place. Both of these two engineered wood products are made with adhesives bonding the wood fibers together, adding to the overall weight.

 

Water Test

One thing that could end up being a major concern for those with a garage band, is water, specifically rain. Speakers are likely to get rained upon at outdoor venues or while moving into and out of an indoor venue. 

With this in mind, I decided to test our materials’ resistance to water. To do this, I cut blocks of all three materials (plus particle board) and left it standing on edge in ½ inch of water, overnight.

The next morning, I checked the samples, to see how much the water had affected them. Specifically, I measured the material thickness, to see how much it had swollen and checked the materials’ durability, by hitting the wet edges of the pieces with a ball-peen hammer.

• Maple – swelled from 0.906” – 0.932”, roughly 1/32”. Material withstood being hit with a hammer, without any visible damage.
• Plywood – swelled from 0.496” – 0.533”, a bit over 1/32”. Material withstood being hit with a hammer, without any visible damage. However, as we can see with any plywood that has been left out in the weather, the more times it gets wet, the more it gets damaged.
• MDF – swelled from 0.500” – 0.693”, about 3/16”. That’s quite a bit and it is doubtful that the material would shrink back down to the original size. Interestingly enough, of the various materials I tested, it was the only one that became wet all the way through. It was easily and fairly seriously damaged by hitting it on the edge with the hammer.

Volume

A speaker’s volume is important to anyone; but especially to those who might have a garage band. It’s amazing just how much volume you need to properly fill a venue. So, if the material that the cabinet is made of could affect the volume of the speaker, it only makes sense to pick a material that will provide good volume.

I tested this by putting a 1kHz (kilohertz) tone through the speakers, which is pretty typical in the audio testing world. The volume was measured using a sound pressure meter, that gives a reading in decibels (dB). 

It was placed 36” from the speakers, with the speakers placed on a thin sheet of foam rubber, to keep their vibration from reaching the workbench top. In the video, it looks like it’s taking me a while to take the readings, but that’s because I was waiting for the meter to settle down.

• Maple – 83.6 dB
• Plywood – 80.5 dB
• MDF - 83.9 dB

The maple and MDF speakers came out pretty close in this test; but the plywood one was considerably lower, surprising me. That could be either because the plywood wasn’t as dense as the other materials or because of voids in the plywood, which muffled the sound.

Frequency Response

The most challenging test of these speakers was testing their frequency response. Typically, frequency response is something that is tested for entire systems or speaker elements. When you buy speaker systems, manufacturers always provide the frequency response.

But what I wanted to test wasn’t the typical frequency response, checking to see the full range that the speakers could reproduce. Rather, I wanted to see if the materials affected how the speakers reproduced sound at different frequencies. 

To do this, I made a recording of pure tones at different frequencies, created by a frequency generator in an audio editing software program I have on the computer. The various frequencies I used were:

100Hz – 200Hz – 500Hz – 1KHz – 2.5KHz – 5KHz – 10KHz

Full frequency response testing usually goes from 20 to 20,000 hertz, but I didn’t bother with the full range. For our purposes, I decided that 100Hz to 10KHz was sufficient.

The other part of the testing was having some way of reading how well those speakers reproduced that sound. I found an app that I was able to download onto my phone, which would work just fine. 

It was called Spectroid. With that program running, I ran the sine wave recording through each of the speakers, one at a time, and allowed Spectroid to record the volume level out of the speakers. Placed side by side (or one above the other) the results look like this:

There’s a lot of extraneous information in those graphs. The yellow lines are the background noise; we are interested in the red lines. That’s where the app recorded the volume output at the specific frequencies that were on the recording. 

Specifically, if you look at the spikes going up, that’s the volume level of each of those frequencies. I drew the white line there to give us a means of comparing the volume level between the three speakers. That’s shown, without everything else, in the diagram below.

The three speakers gave us similar results, with one exception: the maple speaker worked better at the higher frequencies than either of the other two. That might not make a lot of difference to most people, who are more accustomed to boosting the bass in their audio, than the treble; but if you’re someone who likes either classical or jazz, you’ll appreciate the sound produced by the maple speaker cabinet.

Distortion

In the beginning, it was in my thinking to test for distortion as part of my overall testing; but I eventually decided against that. It takes a pretty complete audio lab, with a soundproof room to test for distortion. Even then, the results might not have meant much.

Most audio equipment has extremely low distortion specifications. However, speakers are different. You can get as much as 20% distortion out of a speaker, especially a sub-woofer. With that much distortion possible, would the measurement have really meant anything? Besides, most people actually prefer listening to music with distortion, rather than “clean” sound.

Continuing along that vein, I came to realize that distortion plays a heavy part in our music today, and has done so since the middle of the last century. Electric guitars, generally the lead instrument since the beginning of rock and roll, are all about distortion. You never hear a pure acoustic sound from an electric guitar.

The way that an electric guitar works is that magnetic pickups set into the guitar’s body pick up the vibration of the strings, creating a sine wave that goes to the various effects pedals. These pedals are distortion generators of one type or another, all of which modify the sine wave, producing various different types of sound. That’s what we hear coming out of the speakers, pure distortion.

Distortion is now used with other instruments as well. Early keyboards were designed with the idea of reproducing acoustic sound as well as the technology of the day. Today, keyboards start out with that sound, and add to it, often adding some sort of distortion or other.

This ranges all across the music spectrum, including vocals. Some distortion is intended to modify the sound produced, while other distortion is intended to “correct” errors in the original sound, such as a singer being slightly off-key. But no matter the type or purpose, it is all distortion.

Final Thoughts

After looking at all this, I’d have to say that the difference between the various materials I looked at is rather minimal. Of the three materials I tested, I would say that plywood is the worst. Even so, if I were building speakers for a garage band, I’d try to use plywood, instead of MDF, because of the risk of water damage to the MDF. 

For home speakers, I’d either pick a hardwood or use MDF, covering it with a hardwood veneer. It truly boils down to what gives you the sound that you want, and that’s going to have more to do with the speaker elements than it will with the material used for the speaker cabinet. When it comes to the cabinet, you’re going to want a material that will stand the test of time, while fitting your budget, more than anything else.