Subwoofers

Perhaps the most controversial area of high-end car audio is the topic of subwoofer enclosure design. Anyone who has been around car audio has probably heard different opinions expressed about which kind of woofer enclosure produces the best sub-bass performance. Some people swear up and down that sealed enclosures produce the best performance, others are equally adamant about the benefits of ported and bandpass designs. Most of these people are well-intentioned in recommending enclosures that they have had good success with, but anyone who says that a given enclosure type is superior in every way is always wrong.

You would think that if a single, truly superior enclosure design existed, everyone would use it. Certainly, all serious car audio competitors would. That is not the case, however. If you take a look at some of the top IASCA competition vehicles, you will notice that many different types of enclosures are used. There certainly is no consensus among these competitors as to which produces the best results. Their choices are based on which enclosure will work best within the limits and demands of their vehicles and systems and produce the performance benefits that they feel are most important.

The most important fact to keep in mind is that there is no "magic box" which will give you the highest SPL, flattest frequency response, best transient response, power handling and efficiency. Everything in enclosure design revolves around the basic fact of life that nothing is free.

What we will attempt to do in this tutorial is to discuss all the popular enclosure designs. It would be nearly impossible to thoroughly describe the physics involved in each enclosure type or to cover all possible scenarios and applications within the confines of one small tutorial, and there are plenty of other references that will do just this so we will defer you to them for a more in depth analysis of each enclosure type. For this reason, we will only give a generalized description of each enclosure type and focus more on their benefits and drawbacks so that you might gain a basic understanding of the trade-offs involved in subwoofer system design.