Horning Eufrodites - help needed with boomy bass

"What material would be best to use for an appropriate stuffing?"

I'm not sure. With the towel, what you did was add flow resistance to the port; you made it significantly harder for the low frequency energy to get out of the port. If the towel was filling the port completely, then you added a lot of flow resistance; the more airspace around it, the less flow resistance.

My suggestion is, trial and error. Bigger towel, smaller towel, see which is a step in the right direction. Maybe open-cell foam (when you "haaaaah" into the foam, can you feel the heat form your breath on the other side? If so, then it' open-cell foam), again I can't tell you how completely you should fill port, or how deep the foam should extend into the port.

Long-hair wool was mentioned. That's great for stuffing a transmission line, but imo the intention here is different - we're trying to reduce low bass output, rather than facilitate it. Unless you packed it tightly into a cloth bag and crammed it into the port - then, it would be behaving more as flow resistance than as gentle damping along the length of the line. Imo you can accomplish the same thing for less money with tightly packed polyester batting or fiberfill.

The variovent is itself a flow resistance device, and one with a rather strong flow resistance, maybe more like packing the port tightly with a towel than like open-cell foam. You'd want to turn the cabinet almost into a sealed box, with the only pathway between the inside and outside being through the variovent (which is dense fiberglass compressed inside a plastic housing that has airflow holes in it).

Duke

I've stuffed into the ports a couple of polyester pillows I have here under hand.
So far the impressions are that the more stuffed, the better it is for the bass control.
With this understanding, Duke, would you have any fine tuning to make on your recommendations above regarding the material to be used?

How about using better feet for the speakers? There are a few guys that make sort of dedicated such spikes.
Would that add to the gig?

I highly appreciate everybody's help here with bringing me back to enjoying my system.

Amuseb,
It`s good to know that such a simple (and cheap) solution has led to this level of improvement.Turning your speaker into a partially sealed box is obviously effective. I`m glad you can enjoy your system now.
Regards,

Listening along, I find that the stuffing of the ports also takes some good qualities away.
The music is less dynamic, the loss of bass is also making it be missed across the spectrum, overall the sound is more itchy and less musical.
Of course this is just with the two provisional pillows tucked in the cave.
Will check the recommended materials in different configurations to see how they do.
Cheers.

The Horning website is pretty lean of info and pictures. There was a model reviewed on 6 Moons way back and it appears that they have made an attempt to couple the speaker to the floor. You do not want to damp any speaker you want to couple the speaker and provide a specific direction for the resonant energy to travel to ground. In this case the floor. If you impede the flow of energy from the cabinet it will sound different and most likely worse.

You may have an EF5 tornado in a box and your room. The energy is trapped and is trying to make it's way out and you will not be able to stop that energy that you paid thousands for. Why would you want to do that? The end result should be to make a funnel cloud of that 2 mile wide tornado and channel that energy to earth because that is what it is trying to do now. You do not want to stop that flow but to steer that energy full speed ahead to ground. Make use of all that energy make it work to your advantage make it work in one direction. I hope these concepts are of some help.

I myself design and build products that enhance the mechanical grounding of musical instruments that touch the floor. I am also a member of a company that designs, builds and sells similar technology for home and commercial audio products. Tom