Well I'm not saying that the philosophy is correct, only that car audio subwoofers (from the 80's and 90's anyway) were designed this way, and so car audio nuts like myself got used to this being the rule of thumb.
But it seems to me that there must have been some reasoning behind all of this. For instance it still makes sense to me that if you're after MAX SPL, a ported design has advantages in this area. Because you get both the air moved from the front of the speaker, and the air being moved from the rear of the speaker out the port. If there were absolutely no differences in the two designs, then why is the EP600 ported and the EP800 not ported?
