Sealing ported enclosure to reduce boom

I agree with the "bad idea".
I have tried it mulitple times over the years, and agree with Knownothing.
Speakers are designed for a purpose, either ported or sealed.
You really won't get the both of best worlds in home audio anyway (alot of full range car speakers are infinite baffle designs and work good ported or sealed).
When I tried stuffing the ports in the past, I gained nothing, and lost alot as far as soundstaging, and bass goes.
Nothing wrong with ported speakers provided they are set up in your room properly.
If you have problems with ported designs, its either that your room has problems, the position of the speakers, or the port is in the front and you are listening near field.
I am a sealed speaker man myself (I (insert heart here)) love my NHT M6's, provided there is good amplication available.
Nothing at all wrong with ported speakers, just experiment to find the best placement.
I have a feeling thats the only problem with your speakers.

There aren't many placement choices when I room is 13x15. Speakers can only be so close to you. The Cardas site recommends (width of room)x(.447)=distance of speaker front to rear wall. That would be 5.5' for me almost putting them in the middle of the room.
I stuffed the ports and they sound pretty good, much better then when I first auditioned them. But maybe there could be some adverse effects when the woofer is sucking in air thru the port. It might not have enough air available to push as per design.

What did you stuff the port with? If you think it sounds better you should find some porous foam material and cut it to fit properly. That should work without any negative side effects.

Thanks, Mapman!

I use a modular port system in many of my designs, and on several occasions being able to ship a longer center section to a customer has saved the day.

The ability of the end user to make this sort of adjustment is a significant, and under-appreciated, advantage of ported enclosures over most other types. There is simply too much variation on boundary reinforcement from one room to another, as well as from one location to another within a room, for a successful "one size fits all" approach to bass tuning. Imho, of course.

Duke