Hi Jay, Micah and all,

quote:

"If in fact a ported design holds an advantage in the area of bass extension, then I'm curious why they would take what seems like 'the harder road' to getting the EP800 to hit those awesome low bass notes that it does. And why it doesn't require gobbs more power than it does to perform the way it performs."

In chatting with Ian during the development of the EP800, the main reason he mentioned in using a sealed box was because if it were ported with the super low frequencies involved, it would be impossible to control port "chuffing" and noise.

So he went the sealed box route. In doing so, sensitivity is lost because you're essentially throwing away all the back-wave energy, so to get the sensitivity back up, he used two big drivers with dual voice-coils on each, wired in parallel. By doing that, he was able to extract the maximum amount of power from the amplifier because the impedance of the two drivers' dual voice coils was around 1 ohm. So we didn't lose out in sensitivity.

Regards,
Alan

Alan Lofft,
Axiom Resident Expert (Retired)