Hey,
I'm experimenting with DIY guitar speaker cabinet stuff.
Right now I'm building a closed-back one, and for that to work properly as I understand it, it needs to be air tight, so that there is some resistance by the limited air volume behind the speaker being compressed or expanded.
So I was wondering how to make the front & back plate / frame joint air tight.
The cab has an inner wood frame around the inner circumference of the whole thing, at the back, against which I intend to press the e.g. back plate with some M6 screws. Between the back plate and that frame, I wanted to put some of that black adhesive foam rubber tape, like 1..2mm, which would seal, hopefully, imperfections in the frame/plate joint, which is, by itself, probably not air tight, due to several "hobbyist in the garage corner & minimal tool set, doing this for the 1st time" construction challenges
Now I wonder... would this actually be "correct", I mean - such a film of foam tape vs. wood-on-wood means that the whole thing is less like "one piece" acoustically, the foam dampens higher frequencies I would guess.
(And the front, as planned so far, gets coarse speaker protection cloth wrapped-around the plate, not sure how air tight that can be made, maybe I'll manage to staple it just to the sides of the plate, instead of going fully around and staple it on the inside...)
But I do not understand enough of speaker cabinets' detailed physical workings to know whether that matters or not. If the wood is not supposed to contribute anything by "oscillating" itself, and it's just about making the thing air tight, then it probably won't matter.
But is that so?