In Part 1, I showed how a wine bottle behaves exactly like a mass on a spring where the mass is the cylinder of air in the bottle’s neck and the spring is the air inside the bottle itself.

I also showed how a loudspeaker driver (like a woofer) in a closed box is the same thing, where the spring is the combination of the surround, the spider and the air in the box.

But what happens if the speaker enclosure is not sealed, but instead is open to the outside world through a “port” which is another way of saying “a tube”. Then, conceptually, you are combining the loudspeaker driver with the wine bottle like I’ve shown in Figure 3.

If I were to show this with all the masses in red and all the springs in blue, it would look like Figure 4.

Now things are getting a little complicated, so let’s take things slowly… literally.

If the loudspeaker driver in Figure 4 moves into the cabinet very slowly (say, you push it with your fingers or you play a very low frequency with an electrical signal), then the air that it displaces in of the bottle (the enclosure) will just push the plug of air out the bottle’s neck (the port). The opposite will happen if you pull the driver out of the enclosure: you’ll suck air into the port.

If, instead you move the driver back and forth very quickly (by playing a very high frequency) then the inertia of the air inside the cabinet (shown as the big blue spring in the middle) prevents it from moving down near the port. In fact, if the frequency is high enough, then the air at the entrance of the port doesn’t move at all. This means that, for very high frequencies, the system will behave exactly the same as if the enclosure were sealed.

But somewhere between the very low frequencies and the very high frequencies, there is a “magic” frequency where the air in the port resonates, and there, things don’t behave intuitively. At that frequency, whenever the driver is trying to move into the enclosure, the air in the port is also moving into the enclosure. And, although the air has less mass than the driver, it’s free to move more. The end result is that, at the port’s resonant frequency, the driver (in theory) doesn’t move at all*, and the air in the port is moving a lot.**

In other words, you can think of a single driver in a ported cabinet as being basically the same as a two-way loudspeaker, where the woofer (for example) is one driver and the port is the other “driver”.

• At high frequencies, the sound is only coming out of the woofer (for example).
• As you come down in frequency and get closer to the port’s resonance, you get less and less from the woofer and more and more from the port.
• At the port’s resonant frequency, all* of the sound is coming from the movement of the air in and out of the port
• As you go lower than the port’s resonant frequency, the woofer starts working again, but now as the woofer moves out of the enclosure (making a positive pressure) it sucks air into the port (making a negative pressure). So, at very low frequencies, the woofer is working very hard, but you get very little sound output because the port cancels it out.

If you look at this as a magnitude response (the correct term for “frequency response” for this discussion), you can think of the woofer having one response, the port having a different response, and the two adding together somehow to produce a total response for the entire loudspeaker.

However, as you can see from the short 4-point list above, something happens with the phase of the signal at different frequencies. This is most obvious in the “very low frequency” part, where the woofer’s and the port’s outputs are 180º out of phase with each other.

In Part 5 we’ll look at these different components of the total output separately, both in terms of magnitude and phase responses (which, combined are the frequency response).

* Okay okay…. I say “the driver (in theory) doesn’t move at all” and “all of the sound is coming from the movement of the air in and out of the port” which is a bit of an exaggeration. But it’s not MUCH of an exaggeration…

** This is an oversimplified explanation. The slightly less simplified version is that the air inside the cabinet is acting like a spring that’s getting squeezed from two sides: the driver and the air in the port. The driver “sees” the “spring” (the air in the box) as pushing and pulling on it just as much as its pulling and pushing, so it can’t move (very much…).