Hi efficient speaker, bass problems

Duke, as you say "...but sealed boxes sound just plain have more natural-sounding bass than vented boxes!" Now I'm guessing (and really ALL this is just guessing on my part,) this is because after the bass driver emits, the vent lags after driver, then the room lags after the driver, then the room lags after the vent. That's a lot lagging. Then of course, unless your using separate subs, the loudspeakers when placed near the walls will have early reflections from midrange on up, smearing that all important range. Now if you do have separate subs, in order to keep any semblance of time coherence your going to have to introduce some sort of time manipulation. Since your already going to have to manipulate the signal, you might as well just consider bass eq from the full range loudspeakers out from the walls in the first place. Which should have the added benefit of better driver integration and more free floor space.

Personally and absolutely speaking, I have never heard a sealed enclosure sound better than vented, now if you are running tube gear then there is some advantage in using a sealed enclosure.

Unsound, I don't think the ear can hear all of these lags in the bass region.

That's one of the reasons bass is perceived as omnidirectional inside a room: Our time-domain resolution is so poor down there that the ear/brain system cannot tell the difference between the first-arrival sound and the reflections.

In contrast (so I've been told by a psychoacoustics researcher; never tried this myself), outdoors the ear is able to discern the direction of low frequency energy down to a much lower frequency than in a room. This is because there are no reflections to confuse the ear-brain system by arriving before it has resolved the initial impulse. We can hear direction at very low frequencies, as long as it's not masked by reflections arriving before our ear/brain system can isolate the first-arrival sound. All of those lags you mention arrive before the ear/brain can isolate the first arrival sound, so perceptually they just get blended in with it. And the room's effects on the frequency response are what dominates the perceptual modification of what would otherwise have been a clean first-arrival impulse.

I used to believe that the superior time-domain performance of a good sealed system was the reason for its "tight, natural" sound, but after reading Earl Geddes and Floyd Toole on the subject, I now believe that the in-room frequency response is the dominant factor by far.

Come to think of it, for many years the most natural-sounding bass I'd ever heard was from an IMF transmission line. A transmission line would inherently have poor time-domain behavior but might well have not only a room-gain-complementary native frequency response, but also significant physical displacement of its two bass sources (woofer and line terminus), with ensuing dissimilar room-mode-interaction from the two along with its smoothing effect. This would have addressed the two main problems of in-room bass reproduction: Gain from boundary reinforcement, and peaks-and-dips imposed by room modes (actually just different manifestations of the same problem). But no one really thought in those terms back then.

Duke

Duke, we have all read that bass is omni-directional, and yet very often it's very easy hear where the sub-woofer is (perhaps it's because the overtones appear to come elsewhere?). Despite the theories, some of us clearly prefer the sound of sealed boxes over ported ones. As the old cliche' goes; "the proof of the pudding is in the eating".

Stereophile recently claimed they had tested 750 speakers and the average sensitivity was 86dB . John Atkinson didn't come right out and say it, but seemed to prefer sealed box designs .
The only sub Iv'e heard that didn't give away it's position was a very large REL .
All this ( proof is the pudding ) talk is making me hungry .