I received my pair of March Sointuva's in Sheoak wood, after a long wait of nearly three months.
With a certain thread here posted during the wait I was a bit worried.
These worries have been neutralised.
The build quality from what I can tell is tremendous. I did notice a couple of minor imperfections here and there in the final finish, but I am not disappointed. They look even better than I had imagined. The sound is wonderful, even in my non-ideal setup of being behind a desk with the speakers stand mounted a few metres behind it.
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I told you they were pretty nice sounding.
(But I would not trust someone I don’t know.)
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The bass on these is more intense and goes far deeper. I still will be getting a couple of subs later on.
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It is pretty amazing how much bass they have.
I was pretty damned surprised myself.
I'm no woodworking expert, ...
The place where the cabinets are made have about a two handfuls of people, ranging from some more junior through to well experienced woodworkers.
They do all sorts of work there… windows, doors, stairs, etc… and it is all absolutely first rate.
Most of those features get filled with a resin or epoxy and the surface finished with something like Osmo.
I am more of a “gentleman wood worker”, having made a few bathroom cabinets, furniture, doors, and other odds-n-ends.
If I could work out a deal to get those speakers in the wood I wanted, I would have done so… But alas we could not come to an agreement.
I'm no woodworking expert, but I wonder why he didn't build the speakers out of plywood or MDF and just use different veneers? The different stiffness of different materials means that the speaker could behave differently depending on what wood was used to construct it.
Personally I would trade rounding a sharp edge using the advantage of a thick solid wood core, over suffering diffraction from the edge of a sheet of MDF.
We (consumers), and we (professionals), use MDF because it is:
- Easy to work with
- Cheaper than solid wood
- Requires less skill
- Can be painted or veneered to look sort of like real wood
- Can be made from cheap wood chips
It (MDF) is the stuff that IKEA and other cheap stuff is made from.
But it also is uniform, and has good dampening, can be multi-layered to have dampening layers in it… etc.
So it is a good choice for mass production.
Making a speaker cabinet from solid work is “a statement”, and when there is attention to resonance, then it pretty special.
@Erin noted this in his YouTube review.
One would need some testicular fortitude to make a cabinet out of solid wood, which is why we see only a handful of DIY speakers make that way.
And once the cabinets get big then likely need some bracing to stop resonances.
The closest thing we see are the machined alloy cabinets.
The ‘cracks’ are a common sight in Australian bespoke carpentry and cabinet making and are called features by the builders I know. Locally they are desired as showing the individuality of the product vs mass factory manufacturin of particle board covered with veneer. While working for these builders I have been part of many conversations with customers as they view and chose timber pieces - much focus is placed on picking lumber that has interesting features like this that do not affect the structure but can be stained or treated to show up and show off whatever is being made. Maybe it’s cultural, but Id prefer unique features like this over clean veneer (assuming that it’s epoxy filled when used in a speaker cabinet.
^yeah^
And many of the 100 year old railway bridges and “ties” have these features in them.
But Crickey, we trust these (god only knows how) massive trains to run on them.