When I get subs I'm going to make my own box. My dad's a carpenter so a box like that is something he can build in his sleep but I want to try and make my own and only use him if I need help. I also play bass guitar so I know the wood can greatly affect the quality of the sound so I was thinking of making it out of wood like swamp ash or maybe alder. Did any of you make your boxes out of material like that? How did it turn out?

 

I too am a bass player. Nice!

I've made some guitar and bass cabinets in my day and find that the only thing that really makes a big difference is the baffle. I've used maple and birch for some bright cabs. Much better than any chip board.

Here's the run down on why tone woods would be a waste of money for audio purposes. Ready? This may take a long time.

When audio is recorded it is equalized and mixed beyond belief to try to attain a "flat" response. For true SQ (sound quality) setups, you want to try to reproduce that flat response. For these cars, a 10 inch running about 500 watts should be able to attain a flat bass response to run along with the interior speakers. That's right! Contrary to the popular belief that the bigger the bass, the better.. such is not so for SQ setups.

To get as close to a flat response as possible, you want to have the densest wood possible. 3/4 MDF is usually the best around for that. The wood is manufactured so it is uniform. The exact opposite is of tonewoods. No two are alike because they were living things at one time. Tone woods "color" the sound. Much is why a bass with a maple neck will sound so much different than a bass with a wenge neck.

Besides being expensive, the tonewood would color the sound of the enclosure to some extent. This would deviate from the tone that a good sub box would attain.

It's all in the wood - not the watts.

 

Right. Tone wood = good for making music, but bad for reproducing it.

 

just stick with mdf and if you want to get technical then coat the inside and outside of box with a polyurethane finish it makes a difference and sound quality ive built quite a few boxes also the shape of the box and the volume inside is also very important longer the box deeper bass shorter more punchy sealed ported list goes on

 

I'll agree that the volume matters, but not the shape... At least not for sub enclosures. The shape is irrelevant at bass frequencies because the longest dimension is still way shorter than the wavelengths, so there is no opportunity for standing waves to occur in the box. At bass frequencies, it's simply a matter of how the air pressure effects the motion of the cone, which is determined solely by the air mass (read: volume) within the box.

 

maybe i explain it wrong
i agree with you on that
if a sub is design for a 1.5 volume enclosure
a shorter box .5 volume will produce a deeper tone
a longer box 1.5 volume will produce a deeper tone
when i was reading about subwoofer design ive read awhile back ago that it was awhile back ago so i dont remember exactlly
maybe it was this i search this but ive been out the subwoofer game fr a minute lol
"the smaller the box in relation to the driver, the less deep bass output will be. Or we can get somewhat deeper bass by reducing the driver size along with the box but sacrifice maximum loudness".