sealed vs vented subwoofers

You cannot ruin the lower midrange with a sub if you cross it over properly and run it at the proper level. Many people expect the sub to take the place of the woofer in their main system. I use them as a SUB woofer, to add bass below the level of the woofer in the main speaker. I do not run the signal from the preamp through the sub back to the main amp. I have 4 pairs of subs , 3 are ported and they all work well. My RELs are ported and I do not know of a sealed box woofer near their price that I would consider their equal. To issue broad decelerations that one type of design is better than another is almost always wrong. Over the last 30 years I have had a number of excellent speakers and most, maybe all, were ported.

Shadorne, I don't go to web sites to compare my subs to others. I listen to them. Have you ever had a pair of RELs in your house or did you dismiss them on the basis of some specification? Those of us who have been in audio a long time have learned that there is no spec sheet or single measurement that will tell you anything definitive about the performance of any component.

I got around to looking on the HT Shack site. I had somehow supposed this to be connected to Radio Shack. I find that it is run by Home Theater Mag. , to which I subscribe but seldom read. I had always thought it axiomatic that the requirements for home theater bass were different from, and less stringent than , music reproduction. Sub reviews by mags like Hi Fi News and Hi Fi Plus state this explicitly. I will be glad to provide citations. I was surprised to see subs apparently being tested in the middle of a parking lot. At first I thought they might be preparing an article on Hi Fi for the Homeless but then surmised that they were doing free air testing of the woofers. This mirrors the testing procedures of 30 years ago when anechoic chambers were used to test speakers. I have not seen this done in years as it became apparent that to take a speaker out of a room was to take away most of the value of the measurement. Since the REL are explicitly designed to be placed close to a wall I cannot see what their performance in a boundary less environment can tell us. The room is the most important component in any system, removing a speaker from a room does not provide an equal playing field; it will favor those designed to be placed well out into a room. In a good test of a component the measurement is done AFTER the listening test in order to explain what the panel has heard. As often as not the measurements contradict what the panel has determined, i.e., the product with the least distortion or greatest frequency range is seldom the best. This does not mean some mystic power is at work but that we have NEVER succeeded in constructing a set of rules which will tell us what makes a component sound good. Stan Curtis, who has spent a lifetime designing amps, is currently writing a series of articles about his career ,describing much of it a process of forgetting theory and trusting experience. For example, that point to point wiring is better than circuit boards and that higher quality parts make a sonic difference even when the measurement of their performance is the same. Peter Walker often remarked that he could design an amp that would look good on every measurement but which would render familiar tunes unrecognizable. 40 years ago I had memorized the Stereo Review and High Fidelity performance graphs of about every amp on the market [not hard in those days]. It was a total waste of time. A friend recently chided me for not paying enough attention to the theory behind a product we both use and like. I told him I didn't care if it worked by channeling Angels from heaven if it sounded good. The only way to determine if you will like the sound of a component is either to listen to it in your own home [by far the best] or read a test by a person or group whose ears you trust of the item in question actually in use in a home environment. NO measurement or design principal has ever been shown to give a close correlation with sound quality.

I have never heard of Floyd Toole . In just what way is frequency response predictive? I will refure you to the review of the Spendor SP1 at WWW.regonaudio.com. " Many speakers look good in the anechoic test chamber or on the computer analyzer. Few of them sound good at home. And if sounding good means producing an audible facsimile of the input for a real listener in a real listening room, then most speakers do a rather poor job indeed. ". He adds: "Of course, one might hope to verify such an impression through measurement, but no one has ever been quite sure what to measure in order to evaluate performance in real living rooms. (Most of what has been passed off as "scientific" analysis has been either too crude or too biased to be of any real use or validity". Your general thesis that measurement alone is definitive of sound quality I had thought to have been abandoned years ago. Your further corollary expressed in a previous exchange that, while you had never heard the equipment I was using , logic would tell you what they sound like I find to be breathtaking in it's naïvety.

There are university courses on every conceivable subject including creationist geology. I prefer the work of accomplished engineers such as Martin Colloms, Ben Duncan or Malcolm Hawksford who are actually engaged in the design of audio equipment. Those who can , do; those who can't, teach has some validity here. If it were so easy to quantify the requirements for accurate sound reproduction why is it so hard to do and why does good equipment sound so different? Good designers will tell you that theory is important but it is only the starting point. An over reliance on measurement is one of the root causes of most bad sound. Hawksford is an academic [as am I] but the serious work in sound reproduction is mostly being done at the practical rather than the theoretical end.