Meet the company that makes cabinets for some of your favourite speaker brands
Never heard of Timberworx? We aren’t surprised. It isn’t a brand you will see at a dealer and it doesn’t sell products online; and yet a surprising number of speakers that you probably know and love have passed through its doors.
Timberworx is a specialist speaker-cabinet maker based in Sheffield in South Yorkshire. It has been under Spendor’s ownership over the past six years and, as well as building enclosures for Spendor speakers, it also makes them for the likes of ProAc, Neat, KEF, Linn and Mission, among others.
There are some big names among those ‘others’, but they would prefer that customers didn’t know that the building of their cabinets is outsourced to a third party, so we aren’t permitted to mention their names… NDAs and all that. Given the investment, expertise and quality at Timberworx, it’s a reticence that we can’t quite understand.
Back in the 1970s, there were a large number of cabinet makers in the UK building speaker enclosures not only for British brands but also international ones such as Acoustic Research and Sony. Gradually, that business migrated to Asia, in particular China. This led to a situation where very few cabinet manufacturing facilities were based in Europe – and that remains the case today.
Timberworx is one of the remaining few and, thanks to careful planning and strategic investments, is now prospering at a modern 25,000-square-foot site in the technology-dense Advanced Manufacturing Park in Sheffield, next door to large industrial units occupied by the likes of McLaren, Boeing and Rolls Royce.
There is plenty of room for expansion if needed, and plans are already progressing to add extra facilities for Spendor in the same building. Timberworx currently has 50 employees who collectively build 3000-4000 cabinets a month, which is around four times as many as when Spendor first took over.
High quality small batches
During our visit to Timberworx, we talk to Philip Swift, MD of Spendor (and the co-founder of Audiolab), to find out more about the speaker cabinet manufacturing process. It turns out that Timberworx caters mostly to those manufacturers that want high-quality cabinets in small to medium batches, i.e. tens to hundreds, rather than multiple thousands. The ‘Made in the UK’ tag is really important for many of those companies and helps
