Quote Originally Posted by westend9 View Post
There is just no end to what a guy needs to know to build an enclosure. I'm glad to have found a lot of it here, at Todd's site. Here is a little reading on flared ports. The differential math begins on pg. 31, should you choose to calculate the effect of the flares. I think I would start long and cut, math gives me a headache.
Well, this is true if you're trying to make the most efficient, highest SQ design, i.e. most performance in the least bulk for a given BW, driver. Between the T/S design routine and the mostly freeware it has spawned, perfectly acceptable performing designs can be made with no real speaker design knowledge, ditto the various TL, horn alignments thanks to Martin King's MathCad software, David McBean's Hornresp and now its tapped variants with soho's (no real name posted AFAIK) recent Excel SS optimized for easy loading of designs into the latter.

Basically, almost all of the knowledge (and then some) that I learned the old fashioned way has been made available for ~free to anyone with a computer and the ability to use these folk's software, with tutorials along with program and alignment type specific threads to iron out any 'misunderstandings' since there's also a lot of either out-of-date and/or outright intentionally misleading info as the price one pays for such an extensive, open knowledge base.

Yeah, being higher math challenged, the work done by Kinsler, et al were kept from me and even though I knew folks at the time who could 'do the math' and dumb it down for me into rules-of-thumb, I didn't want to 'owe' them for one reason or another. Had the net been available to me though, it would have been a different story, but having managed to get by just fine without it, no longer care at this late date.

That said, I just remembered Bill Collison's extensive 'adventures in porting' that me and others critiqued on the forums which among other things includes a flare designer, though haven't used it: Collo's DIY Subwoofer Enclosures

GM