Subwoofer Enclosures

The subwoofers come in wide variety of sizes but generally a subwoofer is considered an 8-inch speaker that needs more amplifier power to produce quality sound than ordinary coaxial speaker due to their larger size. Moreover a car stereo subwoofer also requires an enclosure to produce high quality of sound effectively. A woofer enclosure can be as simple as trunk or can be as complex as series tuned dual reflex band pass enclosure. But there are different types of enclosures available in the market manufactured by highly prestigious audio system manufacturers.

The simplest type of subwoofer enclosure has free air system. In this system the woofer has the front of its cone isolated from the back of its cone by mounting the woofer to the rear deck or on a board placed across the back of the rear seat. This type of subwoofer enclosure offers the following benefits: -

• Minimal space consumption
  
• Simplicity
  
• Cost effective

There are some disadvantages also accrue with this type of subwoofer enclosure. This type of enclosure requires more power supply, produces slightly less accurate sound and is difficult in isolating the two sides of the cone from each other.

Other simplest type of subwoofer enclosure is sealed enclosure. In this type of enclosure a woofer is mounted in a completely sealed box that isolates the front and rear waves of the woofer. Advantages of this type of enclosure are as follows: -

• Easy to assemble
  
• Excellent sound production
  
• Smaller in size
  
• High power handling

The sealed subwoofer enclosures also have some disadvantages. This type of enclosures are less effected than vented enclosures and have lesser low bass as compared to a properly tuned and vented enclosures above the port tuning frequency.
The vented enclosure type seems like sealed enclosure in design but there is just one difference that it adds a port that is of certain length and has a certain area around. Generally this length is a PVC pipe, tuned to a certain frequency by variation in the two parameters of area and length. The main advantage of this length is that the rear wave of the cone motion is used to reinforce the front wave.

Some other types of subwoofer enclosure are as follow

• Single reflex band pass enclosure
  
• Dual reflex band pass enclosure
  
• Series tuned dual reflex band pass enclosure
  
• Isobaric enclosure

Basically the subwoofers add high quality of bass in music and different types of enclosure help produce different qualities.