Damping material for speaker box internals

[Chris]

My Totem Arros use some sort of Nasa inspired borosilicate paint to damp the internal walls of the boxes. For my current WD20 project does anyone know of a comercially available equivalent I might use or should I use damping pads or what.
I seem to remember having read that some of you are anti-damping pads (Tenson ?) but is this just a gut reaction or does it depend on the size/materials of the panels ? In my case the boxes are braced and the panels to damp between braces would be say 20cm x 20cm of 16mm chipboard skinned with 5mm mdf. What difference could be expected between damped and non-damped panels of these dimensions ?

 

[Dick Bowman]

I'm fairly sure that something along the lines of borosilicate paint was advertised in Speaker Builder magazine some years back. Might be worth checking out a copy of their current publication (AudioXPress) http://www.audioxpress.com/index.html to see if they still carry relevant ads.

Never saw any, but I suspect it might be something of a stiffening agent rather than a damper.

I suspect that damping materials need to be thought about in the context of the main cabinet materials (thinnish birch ply and heavy bitument pads were a well-researched option in the BBC days).

I also suspect that an aspect of speaker tuning is getting the cabinets to sing along with the drivers - or not, as the case may be. Which suggests an element of experimentation (although it may be hard to get damping materials off once glued in).

 

[Tenson]

It will make close to no difference. The damping goo has to be very thick (i.e. equal to the panel thickness) before it has much effect.