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I've been building sealed subwoofers since 1980 and disagree with most of your conclusions

Posted by Richard BassNut Greene on April 13, 2007 at 07:10:02

In Reply to: Sealed enclosures for subwoofer posted by madisonears on April 12, 2007 at 20:37:19:

An inexpensive DIY subwoofer used with an inexpensive digital parametric EQ will provide more natural sounding bass at the primary listening position (at reasonable volumes) than any unequalized subwoofer at any price IN MOST ROOMS.

The only competition for an EQ'd sub in most rooms is dipole bass.

One Madisound 1259 driver in a sealed enclosure is not enough displacement for many two-channel audiophiles, and not enough for most home theater owners.
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"Design and construction of a sealed enclosure is simple, requiring no complex calculations or tuning. I'm sure more audiophiles would opt for a sealed enclosure if they ever heard a really good one and could accommodate the space required."

RG
The main reason for building DIY sealed subwoofers is the huge design margin of error inherent in sealed designs.

With decent drivers, you can design a good subwoofer without even measuring the driver parameters (very important for ported designs).

Fine tuning can be done with enclosure stuffing.

A unequalized sealed subwoofer and unequalized ported subwoofer designed for a flat frequency response (many are not) will have almost the same frequency response when placed in the same location in the same room.

The ported subwoofer will extend perhaps an octave lower.

It is very unlikely that merely listening to full range music would allow a listener to know whether the sub was sealed or ported, except the extra range of a ported sub design might be audible with some music. Some ported subs do have deliberately non-flat frequency responses, especially inexpensive designs -- that sure could be audible.

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" I think most manufacturers offer ported designs because they are cheaper to make and sell, and can be used more conveniently, but it is a compromise design which suffers from uneven response."

RG:
Ported designs are more expensive to manufacture than sealed designs.

Uneven response is more likely in ported designs only because they are much more sensitive to driver parameter variations AND many engineers deliberately design ported subwoofers for a non-flat frequency response (louder mid-bass impresses many listeners more than flat bass does)
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If you're capable of building a sealed box, it's not much more difficult to turn it into a great sounding subwoofer for a fraction of what you'd pay for an equivalent commercially available item.
RG
You could buy a box, hire someone to build a box, or use a cardboard concrete column form with two wood end-caps, as I did for my last DIY sub.
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007

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