The speaker cones on probably the best studio monitors of recent times (Yamaha NS10s) were made from paper. It can be done!

Pete Morris
Programme Director
Music and Sound Recording
University of Surrey

Don't give Bose any ideas!

The best speakers in the world will still sound bad if you mount them in a bad enclosure. Mass, rigidity, proportions, porting, lining, etc. all play a role in overall speaker performance. A non-sealed cardboard enclosure might as well be a tripod. Heck, skip the tripod and just toss the speaker on the ground.

I wonder how much waste will be generated by silly gimmicks like this, under the guise of saving the environment.

Most great speakers' diaphragm membranes are made of rough papers but their enclosures have always been made of solid woods (I prefer maple woods.)

I doubt if recycled rough papers will do the job as an enclosure (box,) especially if they were designed to be fold-able.

To Harryo,

Bose is a bunch of overpriced junks displayed on a perfectly calibrated sound-room.

Trust me: ANY speakers, as long as they aren't distorted (broken,) will sound spectacular in any Bose sound rooms.

I admire their investing money & time on building amazing showrooms.

I wish they will do the same for their home theater speakers.

-anstorm

So are the speakers themselves made out of recycled material or is it just a pair of speakers put into a set of cardboard cubes?

Saying that paper cones are remotely comparable to collapsible paper enclosures is like... Oh who am I kidding, you probably can't hear anything being said anyway. These are a nifty idea, but you would be better served to strap on a pair of headphones because the response from these speakers is going to be laughable.

Paper speaker cones are nothing new (in fact, most speakers prior to the turn of the millenium used cones made of pulped paper). Paper enclosures, however, are completely useless and are simply a waste of resources. It would be more environmentally-friendly to use actual wood.

Paper speaker cones are nothing new (in fact, most speakers prior to the turn of the millenium used cones made of pulped paper). Paper enclosures, however, are completely useless and are simply a waste of resources. It would be more environmentally-friendly to use actual wood.

Why not just fashion a wire coat hanger, some sheet foam or bubble sheet packing and the two speakers into headphones?

Why not just fashion a wire coat hanger, some sheet foam or bubble sheet packing and the two speakers into headphones?

Simply a "save the Earth" gimmick. Sound quality will be horrible and the cardboard box won't last long which will cause the buyer to toss them..so much for "helping" the environment.
I agree with joebob, a set of headphones will be a better option.

I remember a few years ago a mate of mine had a little Bedford Rascal van. He had two speakers in it that were not in enclosures but just attached to the rear bulkhead by the magnets!

Suffice to say performance and bass were sadly lacking.

Anyway he ran a catering business and an idea struck me. I asked if he had any rigid plastic tubs, the large catering size things that margerine or icecream come in. Of course he had loads and so I cut a couple of speaker sized holes in the lids and slipped the rear of the speakers into them so they were flush with the lid. We tucked them behind the seats and switched on the stereo.

Bammm! The result was superb. The tubs made great enclosures and the bass really throbbed. No distortion even with the volume at max. Worked a treat.

this company is a joke. lol

Regarding sound quality of the enclousre, I think you're missing something... Any speaker set I've ever tested for that price has conclusively demonstrated that the drivers always sound better in free air than inside the enclosure.

Hence, the box is just there to hold the speaker upright so you can approximate being on-axis and get something intelligible out.

The fact that it's all recycled material for the price (since millions of folks buy the cheapest speakers they can find anyway) is the real bonus.

A magnet, a coil, and something independent to attach them each to is all you need to have a "speaker".

I'm sure what we have here is a "speaker". A passing chukle novelty item.

People who buy these and then, when bored or they break becuse they are cardboard, throw them away are doing quite the opposite for the environment. Isn't the point to acquire something that will last and will be kept?

The sound will be horrible and totally lacking bass.
Allthough speakercones can be created from paper, the task of the speaker box is that no vibrations will pass from one side of the speaker to the other.

Eventhough it's cheap, you might as well throw the box away, and just use the speaker! It'd be about the same.

Some of the world's "finest" loudspeakers use paper cones. Too bad you guys are lost in the gimmicks of cheap marketing and the lack of knowledge in materials science.

For real speakers, I refer to linwkwitzlab.

This is retarded.

harryo:
Don't give Bose any ideas!

LOL. Yeah and they will still charge you hundreds for it.

Those speaker, are not amplified as it seems... but i think they can pair up well with mp3/mp4 devices for students, travelers... the rod guy say some thing important... depending on the quality of the speakers they may be a lot less durable than a good set of speakers, so they will be disposed more often... so it´s like garbage generating more garbage... i just bought one of those foldable mini speakers (form CRAIG) using 4 AA batery or a nokia kind adaptor... it´s not the greatest sound in the world but they do they job on trips plugged on my mp4 just fine...

Give them a try, the ideia is not so bad at all...

If I hadn't just bought some really nice speakers I'd be tempted to spend the small amount of money needed to give these things a try. I wouldn't expect much but I also wouldn't be spending much either.

Cool idea.

Great design and thought into doing a good thing for the environment. As for that 1st post about the Yamaha speakers...

Yamaha NS-10's are by far not the "best studio speakers." they lack many things that a proper studio speaker should have such as frequency range, flatness and sound pressure level.

The reason many music studios used them in the 80's and 90's (they're discontinued, and slowly people are figuring out that they don't need them to mix) was because if a music mix could sound good on them they would sound good on anything. they would (and should) never be used as a primary studio loud speaker for any mix. and definitely never be labeled as "best" by any means.

the only part that guy got right was that the main driver cone was made from paper...I sadly weep for the poor misled audio students at the U of S.

Great design and thought into doing a good thing for the environment. As for that 1st post about the Yamaha speakers...

Yamaha NS-10's are by far not the "best studio speakers." they lack many things that a proper studio speaker should have such as frequency range, flatness and sound pressure level.

The reason many music studios used them in the 80's and 90's (they're discontinued, and slowly people are figuring out that they don't need them to mix) was because if a music mix could sound good on them they would sound good on anything. they would (and should) never be used as a primary studio loud speaker for any mix. and definitely never be labeled as "best" by any means.

the only part that guy got right was that the main driver cone was made from paper...I sadly weep for the poor misled audio students at the U of S.

biggie pat
music/post production industry vet

I have a better idea, why not hire a human beat box and have them emulate the sound with their mouths?
Environmentally friendly, the human beat box only requires a burger, fries, and a drink to wash it down! Plus you can use it's poop to fertilize your lawn!

As a consumer of electronic products I find this marketing a little disturbing. Some really cheap speakers mounted onto some cardboard boxes? Come on... As if wooden speaker boxes aren't eco friendly. Wood is plentiful and is not harvested from forests anymore, they grow huge plots of trees in single file lines and rotate harvesting from many different plots. I am sure many of you have seen these plots somewhere. Have you ever passed by a plot of land where all the trees where planted in perfect lines? That is one of the harvested / replanted plots.

My Cerwin-Vegas lasted 30 years. High fidelity speakers are not a problem. These little computer speakers may be a problem though.

These new speakers are not as good a solution as I've seen. Some cardboard spekers had the voice coil built right into them. Even less waste and plastic.

As a nearly 20 year veteran speaker engineer for both pro and consumer realms, I can say with pretty good authority that the NS10s are horrible. A few of the above posters had it right, they were chosen because "everyone had them" (you could more easily move from studio to studio and not worry as much about the monitors), and because if the mix sounded okay on NS10s, then it would probably sound okay on any decent quality consumer speaker.

But a paper cone can still be made to be extremely high quality, or extremely poor quality. In the pro side almost everything is paper due to the high strength-weight ratio, decent internal damping, great temperature tolerance (for when the voice coil former temperature would melt a typical poly cone) and great adhesion. Polymer (of any type) simply can't cut it. In the home side, you can make a good or a bad poly cone (trust me I've seen plenty of bad Chinese-made drivers) and likewise with paper. In general it is *easier* to make a good poly cone and make it more consistently through an injection or sheetforming operation, but poly has no particular inherent advantage here. Some of the high tech polymers (Aerogels, etc) offer some advantages and disadvantages too. The best I've measured have been composite layered construction, but those have also been among the worst (huge resonant peaks just barely outside the operational frequency range). Most metal cone drivers are absolutely awful for the above resonant reason, but I have a design in production now that uses a ~110mm aluminum cone that measures and sounds great. I guess my point is that any design can be made poorly or well.

My take on the original post is that these would make so much noise that I couldn't deal with them. Between the random whistling air leaks, buzzes and rubbing from the panels against each other, poor seal for the woofer to the front baffle, and likely a crummy whizzer cone arrangement this is a textbook way to make a really bad speaker. I could be wrong, but I doubt it! :)

Isn't cardboard made by processing wood anyway..?

Isn't it more environmentally friendly to NOT process the wood into cardboard before making it into speakers?

A speaker enclosure is just a baffle to keep you from hearing the back (out of phase) signal out of the back of the driver. You can mount a good speaker into a wall and it will sound great (if you close the door to the next room) Using an enclosure is just a way of creating a 'leakless' baffle. They can be ported and so forth to get more bass, or resonance in different frequencies, but they are basically a baffle.

Beyond that, the most significant affect a speaker enclosure has on the sound is the SHAPE of the enclosure. Square is NOT a particularly good shape. The shape that creates the least impact on wave dispersion is spherical.

The funniest thing about the Yaha NS10s was that the tweeters were SO harsh sounding we would hang strips of toilet tissue in front of the tweeters. Really class up the control room... :)

You know, if a person invests in a good pair of speakers, and takes care of them, they will have no reason to throw them away. Hence there will be nothing to put into the landfill. Lets face it, speakers will decompose outside anyway, the metal parts will take longer, but will happen. It is a natural process. I am getting tired of these "environmentally friendly" products that are just as bad or worse. Take a look at the fluorescent light bulb. Just how hazardous do you think that white powder coating is? That IS mercury and considered a hazardous waste product and is supposed to be desposed of "properly" according to the EPA. But how the heck and WHERE the heck are people supposed to do that when they have to? But hey it saves the environment!!!

I will do more for the environment by NOT purchasing another worthless product that will just end up being thrown away anyway.

This concept sounds a little far fetched. I don't think they would last very long at all. Each time you folded them to store them you would weaken the cardboard some. Also, my boys like speakers in their cars. I know these would not hold up to the abuse my sons would give them. I also doubt they would sound all that good. I like the traditional speaker in a solid box. If the speaker itself goes bad, the box is still good and a new speaker can be put in it. We've had to do that before too. $15 a set is very reasonable, but they also say you get what you pay for.