I'm still working on my overall install in my Sonoma Extended cab. I went to shop today to get a quote on a custom box. I told him that I thought sealed would be best as I was going for SQ and when I demoed the sub in the shop that I bought it, I demoed it in a sealed box and thought it sounded good. He told me that for my application (in the cab of a truck) going with a ported box would be better because sealed boxes require a surface "x" distance away to be loaded off of in order to get good output. His example was that if you have a sealed box in the trunk of a car facing forward you'll lose a lot of output, but if you turn it around and face the back so that it is loaded off teh back of the trunk, it will sound a lot better.

He seemed like he knew his stuff, is he BS'ing me though just to build a box that's going to cost me more money likely?

NOTE: Box is for a JL 12W0. He measured out a ported box equalling about 2.3ft^3, versus about 1.2ft^3 for a sealed box.

-dyno

 

That sounds smart to me, about the loading of the sealed box. The ported box he has designed for you checks out, and should give you plenty of output. It's hard to get good sounding bass in a regular cab, so a nice low tuning frequency helps out big time.

 

I have agreed way to much with Dukk lately, matter of fact it kind of scary, so I will choose sealed and he will choose ported and then we can disagree again. [img]tongue.gif[/img] . I would take a generic sealed box from him and throw the thing in there and see how it sounds, most sealed generic boxes are around 1 - 1.5 cu.ft in volume and you can be out by a country mile before it will have any drastic effect on performance. If you like how it sounds then have a box built to suit the truck.

Another option is to build the ported box and have a removeable screw on panel on the inside of the box to act as a divider. This screw on divider will be set to the volume of the sealed box. This way you have only built one box and can listen to the box either way. Any good box builder should easily be able to do this.

 

I like your idea of having that "dual-purpose" box Rob. I stopped by the shop before I got that message and put my deposit down on the box. I'm going in later in the week for him to fit it. I'll talk to him about seeing if he can do that if it isn't too late.

Also, I think this was brought up in another thread, but do you think I could stuff the box and then have the box be smaller? How much smaller do you think I could effectively get it by trying this?

 

Dyno: if you were talking to the guys @ nautral sound, I'd say they know their stuff, they've been at it along time. I'd go with Dukk's suggestion, they shouldn't have any problem with the comparison.

 

What I often do is build a ported box and suff a rolled up sock in the port to hear the difference. Crude but it works.