Greetings all, I have but a few hundred questions. I have a set of Altec A7 Voice of the Theater speakers I bought in the mid ‘70’s for $400 ea. As far as I can tell after locating the Great Plains Audio site, they are 828 boxes with 416-8a(?) woofers, whatever horns with 50 watt poly diaphragms and 500Hz crossovers. The boxes have an upper removable rear panel for access to the woofer and a large cloth covered front port panel. I am in the process of sending one of the woofers to Great Plains for reconing. I love these speakers and want to marry them, but my wife says no. I do notice that the mid low and mid high are a lot and the super highs and lows are lacking, although at very high volume and at least 100 feet distance, they sound great. I use them behind a Stax SRA-12s preamp, a heavy dose of Radio Shack 15 band equalizer, and Crown DC300A amp and 8-3” piezo super tweeters per side to fill in the top.
So, is that giant reflex hole in front actually optimized for that woofer? I have tried an online box designer for the 416b that calls for a box size of 15 cu. ft. and a port size of 13.89 cu. in (still nothing below 35hz). I also notice that the horn and box have quite the ring when thumped, so I want to add spray pickup bed liner to the horn bell and encase the box with mdf on the exterior and forming plywood to the outside of the box bell (all plys are in the same direction and are easily bent in one dimension), and then paint them gloss black lacquer to match my grand piano.
Is there an optimum port size for these things? I would like to run these Altecs with a cheap 100 watts/ ch. Technics 5.1 as the front speakers, a pair of Peavey T300 towers as the rear, and build a subwoofer to slave off of the .1 channel, through the Crown amp with either two 4 ohm subs, or one dual voice coil 4 ohm sub. I have looked at a 15” Dayton Titan III and a TC LMS-R 15" DVC, but not at two JBL 2245s. Any suggestions?

This site will not let me post my woofer box calcualtions for 3 more post, so they will have to wait. Sorry