You want a great-sounding speaker, and you start by choosing the right materials for each of the speaker's components. You have to consider what to use for the voice coil, magnet, basket, cone (or diaphragm), grille, suspension elements, and enclosure.

The speaker cone is attached to the voice coil and secured to the flange of the speaker basket. The cone must be made of a strong yet lightweight material because it acts as a piston to vibrate sound waves at frequencies ranging from 10 times per second on a woofer to 20,000 times per second on a tweeter. The cone material must also have damping properties. This means that it must stop when the music stops and not continue to "ring" with unwanted sound. Typically, a dust cap is placed over the voice coil and on top of the cone. It functions as part of the cone, but keeps the area inside the voice coil free of external debris. It is often an important component of high frequency propagation.

Cones can be made of specially coated paper, polypropylene (plastic), impregnated cloth, metals such as aluminum, or composite materials such as carbon fiber. Each material has different advantages and disadvantages, and trade-offs in terms of weight, resonance, cost, and durability. For example, do you want a speaker that handles low frequencies well? Then aluminum, thick paper, or polypropylene may be your best choice, as they will not flex from the force of sound waves. Midrange and full-range speakers often use paper cones.

The moving parts of a speaker (the cone and voice coil) must be fixed in a piston-like motion and minimize lateral movement that could cause friction or stray noise.

The second suspension element may not be visible when the speaker is mounted in its enclosure. This element is often called a spider (because of its spider-like appearance in the early days of speaker design). It also helps to stabilize the moving element laterally and provides additional stiffness as needed. The spider is usually made of thin sheets of phenolic-treated cotton or polyester cotton that are corrugated to allow for spring-like movement.

Another important acoustic (and sometimes aesthetic) decision is choosing the right speaker enclosure. Most enclosures are made of wood because wood is light, durable, and can be machined into almost any shape. Poplar and Baltic birch (a type of plywood) are the most common, as well as medium-density fiberboard (MDF). If you need an enclosure that is small but also resistant to moisture or scratches, plastic is an option. But it may not have the sound-isolating properties of wood, and if the plastic enclosure is not designed correctly, the overall sound quality may suffer.