Butyl damping

Loudspeakers
1

How about encasing a whole speaker enclosure with a substantial layer of butyl rubber?
Now, for aesthetic reasons it would obviously have to be covered but what I mean is, constrained layer damped butyl that encases the whole enclosure.
Especially for subwoofers I could see great benefit in this. I know this is already done sometimes, but not to the extreme.
How thick should a butyl layer be to make an 18" subwoofer enclosure essentially inert? How about 2 inches? More?

Darren Myers isolated his subs totally from the floor with an extremal setup of concrete, butyl, concrete, IsoAcoustics… But what if the driver’s vibration and the internal pressure was isolated with butyl layering such that only the drivers’ output would radiate into the room? Negligible contribution from the enclosure walls. It is expensive to engineer a very inert enclosure, could thick butyl encasing be cheaper?
Any point to this?

2

There’s plenty of speakers made from marble.

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And going back to the days of Roy Johnson and Green Mountain Audio various concrete composite compounds.

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4

Yeah but hey… The price and difficulty of making enclosures out of marble or concrete composite compounds!
Constrained layer damping with thick butyl rubber should be much cheaper and easier.
What I’m wondering is - could we achieve the same level of inertness with butyl, perhaps even better?

5

I have seen many a countertop manufactured. It’s all CNC Water Jet now. It’s fairly commonplace.

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6

I think you would need to use it as a constraint layer. It’s relatively common that you have an “inner enclosure”, a constraint layer (could be viscoelastic glue or some kind of lossy material), and then an “outer enclosure”. Not sure you could achieve the same result with only an inner and a butyl outer…

More importantly, what are you trying to achieve?

7

To be fair I have seen granite and quartz cut for countertops. Marble is too soft and stains too easily to be a quality countertop.

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8

My kitchen counter and my entire master bath are Calacatta marble. It’s beautiful but never again. What a pita!

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11

The thing with marble is that it needs to be glassed. I have a rather antiquarian marble table and its surface has remained very pristine because of the glass coating. I guess it’s glass?
The bottom side is bare marble, it is really soft to touch and I can scratch it with my nails!

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12

Interesting! I wonder if it’s some sort of wax or other coating. I’ll have to ask my wife. She specs countertops and other surfaces fairly often. I think her new favorite might be quartz. But that might be “so 24 hours ago”. Interior design trends are as fluid as the stock market in my observations.