Sealed vs Vented enclosures

My guess is that the quality of the upstream electronics has about as much or more to do with the quality of the bass than the enclosure type. Here's why. I was nuts for acoustic suspension for about 20 years straight. Yep, it made shopping easy. In the last ten however the highest quality, most truly amazing bass I've ever heard has come from ported types. Since I made the switch I realize I've never heard an acoustic suspension speaker with extended highs. Rolling off the high end makes for long term relaxed listening and really is quite pleasurable. But if you want it all, ported is the only place I've ever come close. The moral is, that in my effort to compensate for the sealed enclosures shortcomings, the whole system got better, so now it gets the most out of ported types. My advice? Select the Hype and the Look that suits you, then listen. Get an amp rated at the top of your choice's power handling capability and you're on your way. There is no substitute for the journey.

I am also looking at up-grading my system. All the speakers on my short list are ported- Montana KAS, JMlab Utpoia, the Sonus Faber. I have owned Maggies, transmission line and sealed speakers. The listening room has a lot to do with the correct speaker type. If you buy from a local dealer, get a 7-10 day return policy and try it out. I agree with some of the previous comments relative to synergy among the components, cables and speakers. Trust your own ears and experiment. Good luck and buy what YOU like.

It's not so much that I prefer sealed enclosures, but that I prefer the 6dB octave rolloff a acoustic suspension design typically has. Not all bass-reflex designs have a 12dB rolloff though; I had Dalquists that were ported, but had the first order rolloff - it formed a 'quasi-Bessel filter' between the crossover and the box.

The design decision to use an acoustic suspension enclosure or a ported one is completely independent of the voicing of the high frequencies. So, attributing certain high frequency characteristics to sealed enclosures or vented ones is incorrect. An acoustic suspension enclosure, properly designed, and mounted in the same volume enclosure as a ported one, will roll off more slowly below its resonance frequency, produce less harmonic distortion, or "doubling", and is less likely to have the characteristic peak or hump in frequency response near its resonance frequency. On the other hand, acoustic suspension enclosures tend to be less efficient than their vented counterparts. Vandersteen speakers certainly have bass enclosures which I believe are transmission lines. This is basically a vented design. There are excellent designs of either type and I wouldn't rule out any speaker simply based on its enclosure design.

I've never seen a sweep test of a sealed design that didn't have a hump in the upper bass (around 100 Hz). Yes, the rolloff is usually 12 dB/octave below that, but with an open baffle design, the rolloff is only 6 dB/octave. The rolloff of the bass doesn't determine quality, in and of itself.