(Possibly stupid) question about cabinet design.

[Lucifuge]

I've noticed that in a few combos with a single speaker, the speaker is offset to one side rather than being placed symmetrically in the middle of the baffle. (The Cornell Romany is one obvious one because you can see the location of the speaker through the grill cloth, but I'm pretty sure there are others.

Is this done for a purely physical/engineering reasons (eg, there is not space for the speaker in the middle because of the valves/transformers hanging down from the chassis) or is there a reason why it would sound better like this?

[Alex]

Since it really can't have any effect on the sound it must be a physical reason, such as the transformer, tube rectifier or reverb tank getting in the way of the speaker.

[Lucifuge]

If you think about it, there are all kinds of ways it might affect the sound; pretty much every other aspect of loudspeaker design has some kind of effect: size, material, thickness of the baffle, open/sealed/ported (and in hifi/monitor speakers, materials other than air used to fill the inside of the cabinet.)

Just as the placement of a speaker in a room can make a big difference to the sound because of interference between reflections from the walls, internal reflections inside a closed cabinet could have a similar effect depending on the position of the driver.

In an open cabinet, the sound from the back of the cone will meet and interact with the direct sound from the front, and if the sound has a different distance to travel on each side, this will affect the phase relationship between the two.

The question is whether any of this makes enough of a difference to actually hear.