For this project, I actually prefer a vented enclosure.
The reasoning behind that is that these speakers will be used for
home theater. Generally a home theater receiver only has two settings
- large front speakers and small front speakers. These speakers
will go deep enough to be called large speakers, but the receiver
will send deep bass to the subwoofer so I want the low frequency
response to be as flat as possible. The other possible, calling
them small speakers, will usually engage a high pass filter (crossover).
To make that filter work appropriately it is best to have flat low-end
response - again predicating a vented enclosure.
The last reason to use a vented enclosure is pedantic
- I think it's important for purposes of the tutorial to use a vented
enclosure.... so
We bring up the Vifa enclosure and select the Calculate
Vented... command. This brings up a dialog box that lets you pick
between three different alignments (BB4, C4, and QB3). All three
alignments work satisfactorily for vented boxes - and other alignments
work as well, but these three are good starting points. Interestingly,
C4 and QB3 are identical for a driver with a Q of 0.4, which the
Vifa is close to, and hence there won't be much difference between
these two.
Comparing the two - QB3 has a shorter port and bigger
box, while C4 has a longer port and smaller box. Their response
curves are very similar to each other.
Here's a comparison of the C4 alignment (with a 0.3
ohm series resistance) with the butterworth sealed box alignment.
The butterworth alignment results are in red.

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