Jules,
wood and audio. The only thing I have to go by, thus far and from personal audition, are the fantastic results at Ocellia and PHY-HP I wrote about recently. I've been aware of "alternative" enclosure approaches but never had an opportunity yet to listen to those for myself. However, I have talked to designers who have done certain experiments and there seems to be sufficient data available to suggest that besides a good circuit, a stout power supply, impedance matching between speaker and amplifliers etc etc, resonance control (micro as, developed inside the component - and macro, as encountered in-room from the speaker and environmental interaction) plus subtle material influences on electron propagation seem to be more or less "open frontiers" still.
Lloyd Walker is a true fanatic who happens to make products most everyone agrees work. He eliminates plastics wherever he can and is a big believer in rock maple for resonance control. He also was a controls engineers who got nuclear and petroleum plants online - this in reference to those who poo-poo this whole subject as unfit for real engineers and write off those who investigate these matters as self-proclaimed "golden ears" who imagine to hear things where none are to be heard. Yamamoto creates a wood/resin "composite" with qualities resembling Bakelite for its amplifier decks. More and more speaker companies use plywood rather than MDF for enclosures.
And so on. There are plenty of examples and many of them cannot be argued to have production cost savings behind them.
Because my visit to Southern France was so eye/ear-opening; and because its characters believe heavily in the MDI = avoid synthetics credo; I'm simply inclined to take them quite serious. Which then opens the discussion to include Morecroft and Duelund and bee's wax capacitors and denuded resistors encapsulated in wood and "nekkid" DACs a la Altmann and so forth. There's wood-enclosed headphones as Sony and audio technica make. The list keeps going.
Plus, there's the aesthetic angle. If two amps sounded identical, and one was clad in steel and the other in curvacious woods, I'd prefer the woodie hands down. Wood lends itself to subtle or intense sculpting to go beyond the ubiquitous straight-edged rectangular boxes. I prefer health food to canned food, wool to synthetics, fresh juice to pasteurized. Why not extend that "organic" theme to audio, even if it did nothing sonically (except not to sound worse)? Alas, there's reason to believe it could sound audibly better. If so, why not experiment?
