Jim,
Curious if you have ever though about using other materials other than wood to build your speakers. I feel I see more and use of metal alloys or even carbon fiber. I see meridian cabinets use metal and wood! Just something I was thinking about, as I flipped through an audio magazine recently.
Yes, over the years we have looked at all sorts of materials such as metal, stone, polymers (which we did use in the SoundScape 10's and 12's), constrained layers, etc. The question comes down to what performance increases do you get at what cost? For example, I have always loved speakers with curved side panels. And we could certainly do them. But the cabinets would be quite a bit more costly due to increased labor and the performance differences would be minimal at best.
We have always been focused on value. We want to produce world-class speakers, but at the most reasonable cost possible. After all, the only reason we started building speakers in the first place is that I felt that we could produce high quality speakers at far less cost than those available at the time.
So the bottom line is this: We will always explore new and better ways of producing superior products. But in the end, we will do a cost/benefit analysis and only employ new methods and processes when the cost can be easily justified by a significant increase in performance. That way, regardless of price point, our speakers will always offer incredible performance per $.
I hope that makes sense.
- Jim
