I'm gonna add some volume to the boxes by adding a 3/4" plywood front to it to mount the speakers to and add some bigger ports, as well as some stuffing. I'm about to use my 'ol boxes in my boat as I'm putting a stereo in this winter. In fact, some bass sound waves will emit from the port. A general rule of thumb is a sealed enclosure will give a "tight" bass while a ported one will give some boomiest to it. You might want to add a port to the box to help let it "breath" some for more bass. The premade boxes at Best Buy are larger that what I built so they should be a little better, but since most car speakers are made to use the doors or trunk space as their enclosure, your bass response will still probably be stiffled some. So when I went to use them years later behind the seats of a Ford Ranger I put some mat in the boxes and added some 1" louvered vents (4) to the boxes and while it did help get more bass it still was no near what it should be. Because they were so small it really killed the bass response, just as ncst8er says.
If you notice booming or the speaker excursion being excessive, then remove the matting to make the box acoustically smaller (again this is assuming the stufffing is not rigid volume filler since I've never seen that used, but it could be used to reduce the acoustic volume further).īack many many years ago I made some boxes for some 6x9 speakers as small as possible in order to fit on the rear deck of my'69 Chevy. In the case of the boxes you're referring to thay are porbably not big enough to hurt the speaker even with the stuffing added. Concerning #4, at some point the speaker will "unload", leading to violent excursions and speaker damage.Īs a general rule, it's better to be too small that too big, since too small will only lead to less bass while too big gives poor sound AND can damage the speaker. Speaker are designed with a certain volume in mind and if the box volume is larger than that, then the bass response will extend lower, but will not be even (resonant points, booming at certain frequencies).ĥ. If the stuffing is fiberglass matting or some other non-rigid sound-absorbing material, then installing it makes the box seem larger to speaker and will improve bass response up to the limit described in #4 & 5.Ĥ. The smaller the box volume, the more it will raise the frequency that the speaker folls off at (less low end bass).ģ. If the front and back of the speaker are not isolated from each other in some way, the energy from te back will cancel the energy from the front (especially bass).Ģ. on the speaker, however the following general statements will be true:ġ. It's been a while since I designed any speaker boxes, but the short answer is that you can't predict exactly what will happen without detailed info.