Front Ported v. Rear Ported Speakers

FWIW, I plugged my ports (EgglestonWorks Fontaines, dual rear ports) and raised the crossover points on my subs. It did seem to improve the clarity of the upper mids and HFs somewhat, but I lost too much of the "meat" of the sound to keep them this way. After all, they were specifically designed to operate with open ports. I suspect any critically designed speaker with ports would sound better left open, as intended. My unscientific $.02. As always, try it yourself and see. It is a free and easily reversed tweak, unless you stuff too far and your socks (or whatever) fall inside.

Thanks Rockadanny for sharing your experience. I think I might give it a try and play around with plugging the ports. I think I'm also going to purchase a couple room treatment panels and play around with them too.

In general, front ports should do better closer to walls in theory, but a lot regarding best sound in any case depends on room acoustics and other factors case by case. So its quite possible in some cases rear porting could work best.

The most common truism about speakers is that soundstage depth is almost inevitably compromised when placed closer to the front wall. Second most common is that bass levels will usually be higher as well.

So you can see that specifics case by case will determine what works best, even if certain general trends apply.

Also most good ported speakers are designed to work best in general with ports open to extent designed, but again, obstructing port to various degrees can be a useful tweak in some cases nonetheless.

BEst to make decisions based on what you or some other knowledgable resource most familiar with your situation thinks, will work best in general, but be prepared to think our of the box as needed from there in order to get best results.

My first prototype speakers were front-ported, but I switched to rear-ported. Here's why:

1) If unwanted midrange energy emerges from the ports, it will be farthest possible from the listener, and thus less likely to be audible.

2) It is desirable to spread out the low-frequency sources as much as is feasible in as many dimensions as possible. With a rear-facing port that's at a different height from the woofer cone, once the speaker is toed-in, the two low-frequency sources (woofer and port) are at a different distance from the room boundaries in all three dimensions.

3) If port-plugging is an option, we have less visual disturbance if the port is on the back.

4) If a rear-facing port is tuned with boundary reinforcement in mind, there is no detriment from its being on the rear of the cabinet. Audio Note proved this; my imitation of their approach is sincere flattery.

I recall one time delivering a pair of rear-ported speakers to a customer. They replaced a pair of well-respected front-ported transmission line speakers. One of the first things the new owner commented on was that the in-room bass was smoother. I think this is because, with the speakers toed-in as recommended, the room-mode-smoothing effect of staggering the bass sources in all three dimensions had enough of an influence to be audible.

Duke

I love the way Duke thinks.

Damn, I would love to hear a pair of his speakers someday!