Are Lightweight Plastic Cabinets Coming Soon ??

There have been threads on fiberglass cab builds and other material like carbon fiber.

 

Hope not. There's too much plastic and other non-organic stuff already that ends up as non-recyclabe waste. At least wood is renewable.

 

I have a few modern PA speakers that are plastic (Mackie and JBL).

All of them are heavier than my AudioKinesis and GK cabinets.

 

The biggest hurdle I see with it is overcoming the ratio of hardness to brittle. Wood is rigid and hard, but synthetics with the same hardness and rigidity tend to be brittle; even more so at low temperatures. There is a specification for these materials called cold-crack, and one called flex maxim or similar. In order to overcome physical shock they need to flex, making a sweet spot very difficult to nail down. If it is too flexible it is susceptible to vibration. If it is too rigid it can crack or shatter. They tighten up or even shrink a bit at or below temperatures that lots of gear sees, and this makes them open to fatigue and stress fracture. Like posted above, so far the mass produced products aren't necessarily offering weight savings over wood. The day will come, but for the next decade or longer I don't see anything de-throning wood as king of cab material.

 

God I hope not. Wood is much better for speaker cabs.

 

To be clear: Engineered wood products (i.e. plywood) is good for speaker cabs, and will continue to be until a new engineered solution is devised that outperforms it.

 

Well, there's aerogel.

 

What's the best wood for metal?

 

Ash, because it sounds like something that was on fire.

 

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Plywood is layers of wood and glue, usually with plastic involved, then it covered in plastic stuff like duratex or tolex, with a slip on plastic cover.

I'd like to see more lightweight aluminum cabinets.
Something made from beer cans would be cooler.

 

You just had to go there didn’t you?

 

indubitably. beer cans.

 

A few of both. The amps in the powered cabs don’t add much weight...maybe 2 pounds if that. My bass cabs are shockingly light

 

Dense plastic is pretty heavy i think. Might be cool with 3d printers to print your cab someday though.

 

I think we all know what kind of bass has to be played with that cab.

 

Plastic COULD be used, but in order to make them practical, they would typically be a plastic composite, there would be embedded structural elements and to keep weight down the cost would go up considerably.

Higher end speaker cabinets for PA are showing up as composites, some with structural foam cores and some with light weight wood cores. I'm thinking of the JBL Vertec, VRX, etc.

 

i just had to ...