If someone said that your loudspeakers could harm you, what would you think of? First of all, there’s the hearing damage you can get if you expose yourselves to very high levels of sound; and then, maybe a large speaker falling over you or crushing your toes as you drop it. Well, there is more to your everyday MDF object around the house or office and that is formaldehyde, a toxic compound that is thoroughly used in the MDF industry. But fear not, Elemental Designs has found a solution to this problem.
MDF is short for Medium Density Fiberboard, which is a wood product obtained from gluing together shreds and small pieces of all sorts of wood essences, which, until the invention of the MDF, were treated like simple garbage.
In an attempt to go green, the industry has come up with the new process of compacting this wooden debris after having it ground to roughly the same size and keeping it together with the use of formaldehyde-based glues. The resulting product was very cheap, had a good strength and was very good for speaker cabinets and other pieces of furniture.
But... some of the MDF recipes have been found to emit formaldehyde fumes when exposed to sunlight, heat and in many other conditions. And these fumes posed a health threat more serious than they were initially thought of, with cancer-related hazards and multiple side-effects over time.
Elemental Designs is a company striving to achieve greener products with better properties and less health risks and it has recently perfected a new technology to replace the traditional MDF: the Environmentally Friendly Substrate, or EFS. The EFS involves renewable materials coming from flawed wood logs that cannot go to processing or construction, wood chips, sawmill waste and the likes, made to adhere using a special glue that does not contain any carginogen agents. This detail has a crucial importance as we're talking about a more eco-friendly approach and fewer risks even for the workers.
On the audio side, the new EFS is denser than MDF and when we're talking about loudspeaker cabinetry, density is a key element: the denser the material – the lesser the resonance and the better the sound response. Cabinets made from birch plywood, CNC machined aluminium blocks, carbon fiber or other similar materials come with better performance than MDF but the price is dramatically higher.
Now, with this new technology we can actually expect to see EFS cabinets and furniture in the stores and have a better sleep without fearing the volatile toxic substances our loudspeakers or home décor could harm us with.
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