Is there much of a sonic distinction between front-ported, rear-ported, and non-ported speaker cabinets?
The low end of a non-ported speaker cabinet is going to roll off sooner, but it will roll off at a slower rate than front or rear-ported cabinets. With a ported cabinet, you can tune it so that it extends the low end frequency response, and the entire system won’t start rolling off until you are at a lower frequency. There are different things that you can do in the design of a cabinet to adjust its roll off frequency, but for the sake of comparison, we’ll use this example. If you have a non-ported cabinet which has a bass frequency roll off at around 100 Hz. You could extend that frequency roll off down to around 75 Hz by making it ported, but now the roll off rate will be twice as fast. If you plotted these results on a chart, you would see that the bass frequency response of a non-ported cabinet would begin earlier at a higher frequency, and the frequency response of the ported cabinet would stay flat longer. However, once the frequency response of the ported cabinet begins to fall,
