'Real' bass - ported vs sealed speakers

[savvypaul]

Ps . Is it necessary to quote the post your post if you are responding to the post directly above yours

Not necessarily.

It does provide the quoted poster with an automatic notification, which may be helpful to you if you are hoping for a reply.

Use as much or as little as desired.

[Daniel Quinn]

I didn't know about the notification , now it is perfectly understandable and the fact it made me mad as disappeared .

[Nigel]

I bow down to your expertise. However, it's not so easy to get large loudspeakers to work well in smaller rooms.

[karatestu]

I bow down to your expertise.

There are no experts here

[savvypaul]

I bow down to your expertise. However, it's not so easy to get large loudspeakers to work well in smaller rooms.

In my 16' x 14' room, the speakers I've had most problems with are small standmounts with rear ports. The largest speakers I've had are Quad 57s. They do take over the room, but they sound great.

[savvypaul]

I bow down to your expertise.

There are no experts here

We only need to be our own expert. What our own ears like and dislike, and why.

[SteveTheShadow]

When you get down to 12 x 12 with 9ft ceiling rooms like mine, where the hi-fi has to share space with the TV and the distaff side of the household, then compromises have to be made. Large speakers in a space like mine are simply too overwhelming as I’ve found out the hard way. I designed some large sealed single driver speakers so that they could go flat to the wall, which helped enormously in terms of combatting boom. However the elephant in the room continued to be the fact that in that space they were simply too damned loud. They could not be turned up to give bass chest thump without serious risk of hearing damage and a noise abatement order from the council, hence my eventual move to slimline Mission floorstanders with front ports. These give a far more balanced sound in my room and the bass is capable of going way down without the risk of hearing damage from the mids and top.

Ironically, the only speakers I ever owned that could hit the chest in my living room at a reasonable volume level were a pair of sealed box KEF Coda III bought around 1982 (87dB/W @ 8Ohms.) I’ve never had that in-room experience since. The Mission 773 have a similar frequency balance to the old KEFs but the 5in Aerogel driver is not big enough for that kind of bottom end lark. In terms of the in-room balance I get, I’ve almost come full circle.

Loudspeakers and the way they interact with the room environment is a difficult thing to get right and when you get lucky like I did with the Mission 773s, the operative phrase had to be “Yep, I’ll take that. Jobzagood’n.”

[Lindsayt]

However the elephant in the room continued to be the fact that in that space they were simply too damned loud. They could not be turned up to give bass chest thump without serious risk of hearing damage and a noise abatement order from the council, hence my eventual move to slimline Mission floorstanders with front ports.

I don't understand? If they were too loud, why not just turn them down and listen at a volume that wasn't too loud?
If by loud you mean distortingly loud, then that's not my impression of them from listening in the Owston room.
Do you mean they lacked bass chest thump unless turned up loud? Well maybe a little bit, but they had reasonable bass quantity and quality for such inexpensive speakers - in the Owston room.

[SteveTheShadow]

They lacked physical bass impact unless they were at ear shattering levels. In the end that was the reason I gave up and sold the drivers. It’s the old adage:

Deep bass
High efficiency
Smaller cabinet.

Pick any two you can’t have three.

[Vinyl-ant]

The 15" ones wont hit you in the chest with the bass any more than the 12".

Both went from sealed to aperiodic loaded, the 12s had the vent in the bottom firing at the floor, the 15s have it firing up at the ceiling.

Going from sealed to aperiodic vented was beneficial.

The aperiodic vent isnt meant to extend the bass response, it is supposed to have the effect of flattening the impedance curve where it spikes right up at resonance.

The vent has surprisingly little coming out of it.

A sealed, vented, ported, transmission line, mltl, whatever, cabinet is not necessarily better or worse than any other, how it interacts with the room is and always will be the biggest single factor in my opinion. And you cant know untill the speaker is in the room.