Guitar Gear Forum

What's this "particle board/MDF baffle" which Palmer cabinets are made of ? How would you compare it to the classic material birch plywood ?

it's basically sawdust and glue. It's structurally strong, but the resonance is horrible. Stick with 13-ply birch if you can.

Whether or not it sounds good depends on the design and purpose of the cab. Good 13 ply birch is pretty standard for guitar cabs although pine can also work well for some stuff, certainly old lower wattage fender circuits. There are some composite plys out there such as WISA twin which is a mix of birch and spruce. I've made some over sized 412s with this to good effect. Oversizing the cab increases the thump and moves the mid range bump to be a little darker which can sound muddy but the decreased resonance of the ply from the spruce layers keeps the cab tighter. I do think people do get a bit hung up on the all birch constructions sometimes, not that it isn't a proven method.

Heres some we made earlier:

MDF sounds fine in properly designed applications: if it's good enough for $50,000 home audio enclosures it should be good enough for your guitar cab. MDF's problems are more to do with how and where we use our guitar gear. MDF is almost a third heavier than a similarly shaped hunk of birch ply, and over a third heavier than pine. That means manufacturers using MDF have to either go thinner, or accept that the finished cab will be heavier. (My 4x12 already weighs 100 lbs.; it makes me a little ill to picture it at 115.) If they decide to go thinner, that exacerbates another problem - MDF is not as strong as hardwood ply, which is not an issue for a speaker that lives next to your home stereo for 20 years, but is a problem for a cab that's getting half-lifted, half-dropped out of a van every weekend. Also, MDF can swell and buckle when it gets wet, whereas ply will not.

benjamin801 wrote:MDF sounds fine in properly designed applications: if it's good enough for $50,000 home audio enclosures it should be good enough for your guitar cab.........

I agree with your assessment of the structural superiority of good plywood over MDF - but the statement above is not comparing apples to apples.
Home audio high end systems are going to absolutely flat response - no coloration at all.
I don't know many guitarists who want to play through a perfectly flat system - tube amps aren't flat, nor standard cabinets, and certainly not most guitar speakers.

Although now with advent of modelers, Full Range - Flat Response speakers may become more common for guitarists.