T

TankTop5

Audioholic General
A couple points I’m confused on, sealed subs are generally recommended for music and ported for movies. My question is, many newer sealed subs will go infrasonic, is there a significant difference in SPL? Are there other differences that don’t translate into specs on paper such as do they have a different sound?


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William Lemmerhirt

William Lemmerhirt

Audioholic Overlord
A couple points I’m confused on, sealed subs are generally recommended for music and ported for movies. My question is, many newer sealed subs will go infrasonic, is there a significant difference in SPL? Are there other differences that don’t translate into specs on paper such as do they have a different sound?


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Sealed vs ported is a myth that goes back a long way, to when many ported subs were one note fart boxes. Like probably before 2005?
Fast forward...
The only advantage to sealed is size. As for HT spl, it can take as many as 4 sealed subs to equal a single ported sub at port tune and probably up to about 40hz. So sealed subs can “theoreticallyl go deeper due to shallower roll off, it’s often overstated and should be mentioned that the sealed sub will have MUCH less output below roughly 35hz.
To me, there’s no reason to buy a sealed sub unless you just don’t have room.
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Its just a bad generalization. Depends on specific sub design and specific room involved to fully answer....
 
T

TankTop5

Audioholic General
Its just a bad generalization. Depends on specific sub design and specific room involved to fully answer....
Can you give an example where a sealed sub would be a better choice than a ported specifically for home theater and vice versa?


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lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Can you give an example where a sealed sub would be a better choice than a ported specifically for home theater and vice versa?


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Maybe, just define your parameters. They cross over so much with good designs its really not much of a consideration. Often placement issues and aesthetics are more problems than simply design....
 
William Lemmerhirt

William Lemmerhirt

Audioholic Overlord
Can you give an example where a sealed sub would be a better choice than a ported specifically for home theater and vice versa?


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Won’t speak for HD but to me it might be a better choice if you either have 18 of them, or a tiny room.
 
T

TankTop5

Audioholic General
Maybe, just define your parameters. They cross over so much with good designs its really not much of a consideration. Often placement issues and aesthetics are more problems than simply design....
Ok, let’s assume a sealed 2000 ft.³ room and a pair of SVS SB3000’s, Rythmik F15’s or HSU UHL-15’s? Would those or similar sealed subs produce bass at levels most bass heads on this forum would consider significant for home theater? Obviously this is subjective.


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lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Ok, let’s assume a sealed 2000 ft.³ room and a pair of SVS SB3000’s, Rythmik F15’s or HSU UHL-15’s? Would those or similar sealed subs produce bass at levels most bass heads on this forum would consider significant for home theater? Obviously this is subjective.


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It's obviously mostly undefined.
 
T

TankTop5

Audioholic General
It's obviously mostly undefined.
Can you stop being a lord helmet and try actually help someone who’s asking questions or shut your pie hole? Apparently I don’t know the right question to ask but with elitist twat waffles such as yourself why should I bother? You could choose to say something like, “it sounds like you’re asking X but you should really be asking Y because...”. But instead you chose do be as unhelpful as possible and simply put your character on display, or should I say the lack there of!


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William Lemmerhirt

William Lemmerhirt

Audioholic Overlord
Ok, let’s assume a sealed 2000 ft.³ room and a pair of SVS SB3000’s, Rythmik F15’s or HSU UHL-15’s? Would those or similar sealed subs produce bass at levels most bass heads on this forum would consider significant for home theater? Obviously this is subjective.


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So 2000cuft is not really that big. So maybe a pair of sb3k’s would work but it depends on your expectations. For me, without being able to measure them in room, I would just choose the pb3k. While the SB’s would play down into the teens, the vented subs will still have the advantage below 35hz and provide a great deal more TR(tactile response). How much more is a theoretical and will depend on a few things. Also if the room is on concrete, sealed will be at more of a disadvantage.
Can’t speak for the other bass heads but for me? No...
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Can you stop being a lord helmet and try actually help someone who’s asking questions or shut your pie hole? Apparently I don’t know the right question to ask but with elitist twat waffles such as yourself why should I bother? You could choose to say something like, “it sounds like you’re asking X but you should really be asking Y because...”. But instead you chose do be as unhelpful as possible and simply put your character on display, or should I say the lack there of!


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Can you stop bringing in old myths or political bullshit to your posts? I doubt it...
 
T

TankTop5

Audioholic General
Can you stop bringing in old myths or political bullshit to your posts? I doubt it...
Old myths, old to you but not to others. That perfectly illustrates your elitism, knowledge you have had in your head directly relates to the lack of knowledge others have and you look down with contempt. Secondly I think you’re referring to some of the memes I posted in the joke forum, obviously you’re a little dim upstairs and unable to separate jokes from reality. Do you carry everything on your shoulders that upsets you, that’s a tough life, set it down and relax a bit, life’s actually good!


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Verdinut

Verdinut

Audioholic Spartan
Can you give an example where a sealed sub would be a better choice than a ported specifically for home theater and vice versa?


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A well designed ported sub is always better than any sealed sub, as it is far more efficient in the lower frequencies and has lower distortion figures. The only good reason to use a sealed sub is when the room is small and you don't have much space for the ported one.

EDIT: A ported sub is also as good for music as it is for movies. Don't believe web info that says the opposite.
 
ryanosaur

ryanosaur

Audioholic Overlord
I concur with the group on this... sealed output falls off too early and cannot match a well designed ported sub for most situations.
The only time I recall having Sealed Subs recommended while I was shopping was in a hypothetical situation where I would but 4 ULS-15s from Hsu. In my small room, the cabin gain would be incredible.
Between two ported or two sealed, the recommendation swung back to ported, hard.

It seems generally accepted that you will lose the benefits of cabin gain from sealed subs in any room over 3000'3. And to truly benefit, a minimum of 3 is probably required to begin to tap that potential.
 
T

TankTop5

Audioholic General
A well designed ported sub is always better than any sealed sub, as it is far more efficient in the lower frequencies and has lower distortion figures. The only good reason to use a sealed sub is when the room is small and you don't have much space for the ported one.

EDIT: A ported sub is also as good for music as it is for movies. Don't believe web info that says the opposite.

Thanks, that’s what I was looking for. So there’s no difference in quality of sound with a very good ported subwoofer? When I upgrade my PB1000 I want the sound quality to Mach my speakers, the PB1000 gets low and displaces a lot of air but it doesn’t have the fidelity I like. It did do something cool though, toward the end of Picard episode 8 there’s a scene where the bass rolled through me slowly, it was weird.


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Pogre

Pogre

Audioholic Slumlord
Can you stop being a lord helmet and try actually help someone who’s asking questions or shut your pie hole? Apparently I don’t know the right question to ask but with elitist twat waffles such as yourself why should I bother? You could choose to say something like, “it sounds like you’re asking X but you should really be asking Y because...”. But instead you chose do be as unhelpful as possible and simply put your character on display, or should I say the lack there of!


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You've been here long enough and participated in enough threads to know that the general consensus around here is that the ported/sealed thing is a myth. It's stated over and over, in many different threads all over this board. How long have you been posting here?

What exactly is it you want to know? If your room that one rare room that is best suited only for sealed subs (tho I can't imagine...)? I doubt it. Like I and many others have said, the sealed vs ported thing is a myth. The only advantage to getting a sealed sub is size. That's it. A well designed ported sub will sound just as good for music as a sealed sub.


 
TLS Guy

TLS Guy

Seriously, I have no life.
A couple points I’m confused on, sealed subs are generally recommended for music and ported for movies. My question is, many newer sealed subs will go infrasonic, is there a significant difference in SPL? Are there other differences that don’t translate into specs on paper such as do they have a different sound?


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The only advantage of a sealed sub is reduced size, after that it is all downsides.

I have said again and again a loudspeaker cone is a dreadful acoustic coupler to the air, and highly inefficient. A bass driver really requires an acoustic coupler to efficiently couple it to the room.

Sealed speakers take gobs of power, have the complication of equalization, and require expensive drivers with massive motor systems to achieve decent spl.

So if you have the room go for anything but a sealed sub. Basically the concept is crude in the extreme and all alternatives should be explored first.
 
KEW

KEW

Audioholic Overlord
TT5, My current understanding on this topic is you want to make sure whatever sub you buy has a fair amount of flexibility to tune it (which can also come from the AVR or a miniDSP, etc).
According to Josh Ricci, the measurable characteristic that most contributes to "articulation" or a "fast" sub is having ratio of higher frequency energy to low frequency energy.
WIthout involving DSP or other manipulation, and just looking at their natural FR tendencies:
The sealed sub
will have a higher ratio of high frequencies compared to the lower frequencies! The problem is a plain-jane sealed sub simply does not offer as much deep bass as you would generally want.
Happily, with a stout driver and enough power, and the right tuning/DSP, you can get significant deep bass out of a sealed subwoofer.
The ported sub has a very strong boost in efficiency at (and near) the port tune frequency which equates to a boost in SPL at the port tune frequency. It takes care to tune a ported sub so that this port tune frequency is not overbearing (thus the comments about fart boxes)!
Happily, modern ported subs from the preferred companies here are well tuned to avoid this being a problem.

But, even better, most of the subs from companies like HSU, SVS, PSA, Rythmik, Outlaw, etc offer a reasonable amount of control over your final frequency response, and I believe that most of them will allow you to get a ported type response out of a sealed sub and a sealed type of response out of a ported sub!
This is important because you don't know what a room is going to do with the lower frequencies! Let's set aside the effects of room modes (because that is generally not the purview of the tuning capability of a typical sub). If you have lots of cabin gain, a typical ported sub with a ruler flat anechoic FR can get boomy and lose any sense of "articulation" because the actual FR in your room would be bottom heavy! Obviously, you want a flat response in your room, not in an anechoic chamber! Conversely, a typical sealed sub in a room with very little cabin gain is likely to be deficient in bass.

One of the best examples of this I have come across is Josh Ricci's review of the PSA XS15SE where he says:
Frequency Response
The basic frequency response shape with the low pass filter bypassed shows a response that is cleanly extended up to 200Hz and beyond, with a gently sloping low end that corners at 30Hz and appears to enter a sealed systems natural 12dB/octave roll off below that point. It should be a good match with the boost often seen in the low bass once placed inside of a room. It appears that there may be a bit of boost employed near 35-40Hz to extend the corner downwards a bit. The overall response with the low pass filter disabled fits within a 6dB total window from 28-370Hz.
Because the PSA XS15SE was the second subwoofer that worked really well for me (after the Rythmik E15HP) I paid close attention to Josh's review!
He is referring to this "anechoic" FR (scroll down to the first two charts):

Of course, the cabin gain you will get in your room is a wild card! Typically placing the sub in a corner will give you much more gain and moving it more to the center of the room reduces the gain.

Personally, my experience has been that Audyssey gets the bass about right in my room! However, I turn the sub down ~2dB for music because every so often a song will be recorded with the bass too hot for my taste and I would rather have a slight bass deficit in most songs than boomy bass on those where the bass is recorded too heavy (IMHO)!
For HT, I turn the bass up by ~6dB for an action movie where I want to feel that low frequency power (muwahaha!) and giggle (tee-hee)!

Ultimately, it is a personal and subjective decision of how much lower bass you want vs articulation (that ratio that Josh attributes to "articulation/speed/tightness".).

But the take away is you want a sub that allows you to tune the FR enough that your AVR can do the rest (if you use Audyssey or similar). Ported or Sealed doesn't matter as long as the sub has versatile tuning options!

My JL Audio E112's are tuned to an anechoic response and I found that they were far too boomy in my room and Audyssey (which has a maximum limit of 8dB (?) cut or boost) could not compensate. So here we have a sealed sub that has been tuned much like a ported sub normally and it was boomy in my room! They are very potent, but they offer no ability to tune the FR, so I cannot make them sound good in my room without adding a miniDSP before Audyssey!
 
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