Wood Cone Technology
Technical Overview
JVCKENWOOD’s proprietary Wood Cone technology reproduces the beautiful resonance of musical instruments.
JVCKENWOOD’s Wood Cone speaker is characterized by a diaphragm made of real wood. This technology aims to reproduce a natural and warm sound like a musical instrument. The speaker’s diaphragm is crafted from solid birch wood. Wood as a material offers a high sound propagation speed and inherently absorbs unwanted vibrations. Additionally, by leveraging the natural anisotropic acoustic properties of wood grain, it reduces resonances and delivers smooth, clear, and natural sound.
Wood Cone Speaker
Technical Details
The development of the Wood Cone speaker was driven by the strong belief that “a speaker should be like a musical instrument.” Be moved by the beautiful tones of wooden instruments such as violins and guitars, one of our engineers dreamed of creating a speaker with a wooden diaphragm. To realize this, the team adopted special techniques to fully harness wood as a speaker material.
• The “Wood” Material for Beautiful Sound
An ideal diaphragm material needs to transmit sound quickly and absorb unwanted vibrations. Faster propagation Velocity of sound wave allows even subtle details to be faithfully reproduced, while greater internal loss means unwanted reverberations are dampened, resulting in pure sound. The Wood Cone speaker’s diaphragm (birch) has a very fast propagation velocity of sound wave and exhibits large internal damping, unlike other materials with similar speed. This combination enables the reproduction of delicate, rich and clear sound.
"The material of 「Wood」 that delivers a beautiful, resonant tone"
• Proprietary Wood Cone Diaphragm Processing Technology
JKCKENWOOD’s Wood Cone speaker’s diaphragm required innovative processing to overcome wood’s natural challenges, such as brittleness and deformation due to humidity or temperature changes. The engineers developed a unique wood-softening technique using Japanese sake to prevent cracking when pressing thin wood sheets into cone shapes. They also applied a proprietary wood stabilization technique to successfully prevent warping or deforming of the diaphragm under changing humidity and temperature. These proprietary technologies deliver natural, warm sound while maintaining durability.
Proprietary Wood Cone Diaphragm Processing Technology
• Refining the Wood Cone with Recording Engineers
Our desire is to deliver the emotions the artist poured into their music, exactly as they intended. We collaborated with engineers at Victor Studio to realize the final tuning of the wood cone, in pursuit of our core philosophy of “In Quest for the Original Sound”. The recording engineers – who work directly with artists, record their performances, and produce the master tapes – also had a long-held ambition to create home audio that could faithfully reproduce the sound of those master recordings. The engineers who pursued the potential of wood's acoustic properties and the recording engineers who knew the master tape sound inside and out, repeatedly performed rigorous tuning. This collaboration significantly elevated the true potential of Wood Cone technology.
Wood Cone refined with recording engineers
Products Incorporating This Technology
Examples of products incorporating this technology.
