You have received your package from akustikstoff.com and are now holding a beautiful piece of fabric in the colour of your choice in your hands. Now it's time to install it (you can find out the best way to do this in our tutorials here). But obviously the speaker fabric has two different sides and you are wondering which side of the fabric should face outwards.
Things used to be simple, because until the 1970s, more or less coarsely woven materials or even braids were usually used to cover speakers. All these covers have an attractive front, but the back is usually rather unsightly. You may remember such materials from grandma's steam radio or vintage speakers. And if you make music, you will still come across such woven cover fabrics on the vast majority of instrument amplifiers and combos. It even makes sense to use them here, as these front coverings are relatively robust and therefore well suited to the rough and tumble of the stage.
A typical woven cover fabric that is now only found on instrument amps.
But that is the only advantage, and it comes with a whole host of disadvantages: the material immediately frays unpleasantly at the sides, it is almost completely unstretchable and therefore extremely difficult to mount, especially on frames, and we shouldn't even talk about the acoustic properties. While it is at best indifferent or even desirable for instrument amplifiers that the front covering ensures a frequency response that is anything but linear, nobody wants this acoustic behaviour in the hi-fi sector and in PA applications. Since the 1970s, therefore, more and more foam panelling has been used, which after a while turns into a sticky, crumbly mass, or knitted and warp-knitted fabrics.
With the exception of a few speciality fabrics, our fabrics are also knitted. These are so-called single jerseys. This fabric quality is knitted on just one row of needles, creating alternating knit and purl stitches. This makes the fabric very stretchy, which facilitates assembly and gives the assembled fabric very good acoustic properties as well as high infrared permeability and, last but not least, sufficient stability. The alternation of right and left stitches creates an even surface, which is slightly different on the left and right or "front" and "back".
Our Speaker Cloth viewed from the left and from the right ("front" and "back"). The two sides differ slightly due to the manufacturing process. In acoustic terms, however, there is no difference.
The sound is in no way affected by which side of the Speaker Cloth is mounted as the front. Acoustically, the only decisive factor is the resistance that the fabric offers the vibrating air column across the frequency spectrum - and this is identical in both directions. Incidentally, with our fabrics this resistance is below the detection limit, so the sound can pass through unhindered and there is no loss of sound quality - one of the reasons why many high-end speaker manufacturers use our speaker fabrics as OEM cover materials.
So our simple answer to the initial question is: take the side that you like better. The only thing that matters is your aesthetic preference. And if you want to hear the real sound of the speaker in your instrument amplifier, we recommend our particularly robust "plus" Speaker Cloth, which you can also combine wonderfully with our other fabrics.