No... no, no, no, lol. I spent a fair amount of time explaining to you there's really no difference between ported and sealed aside from size and bass capability. What you heard could have been, and likely was, different placement in the room or different setup or different volume settings or expectation bias or all of the above. You can't compare subs like that. There are so many different factors, and room placement is huuuuge. A sub can sound fantastic in one spot, move it over 2 feet and it turns into a boom box whether ported or sealed.
Sorry for getting wordy, but this is a myth that absolutely needs to die. The only way to really judge a sub is in your room, properly set up. Anything else and all bets are off. A demo room at an audio store who knows how things were set up. The ported sub you heard might have simply been turned up way louder than it should have been to show off how much boom it can make.
I think you need at a minimum a pair of good ported 12s, leaning toward a pair of 15s even. You can trust SVS, Hsu, Outlaw, Monoprice, Rhythmik... I know I'm forgetting a couple more, but those are some of the main guys. Any one of them make very capable subs and they're all going to sound pretty close to the same. Like I said earlier, we don't pick up on voicing or sound signatures with bass the same way we do with higher frequencies.
To summarize:
Ported and sealed are equal as far as sound quality. The only difference is size and bass extension.
In store demos are not a very good way to audition a sub. It may not even be set up correctly.
