Originally Posted by: Martin Colloms 
It would be useful to have listening reports from those few sealed box users out there.
For what little it's worth...
I've owned both "types of bass", and I much prefer the sealed-box type. But this is only
in my experience, which is of necessity very limited, since I don't work in the trade, and also (like most of us) I have to (and want to) have the hifi in the living room, which leads inevitably to domestic limitations, shall we say, on placement. But anyway...
The subjective trade-off, again
in my limited experience, is between quantity and speed of bass. Ports give you lots of the former, and it's perhaps a price worth paying in a small stand-mount speaker, but big ported boxes have - on the whole - never really done it for me.
I owned, for example, ProAc Response 3.5s for a while, and I believe that they were quite critically well-regarded at the time, and they certainly had a lovely midrange, but they never quite gelled for me as a coherent musical whole. I'd always assumed it was just my room, but... I have a friend with N802s, and again there's certainly no shortage of bass but
for me it doesn't always quite gel. The room again, or a stereotypical property of ported bass?
My current ML speakers with their sealed bass bins (with 10" drivers) don't have a whole lot of bass - I'd like more - but what there is, is fast and tight and tuneful. Subjectively, I feel that they really get me to the heart of a musical performance. And I don't think that that's about air and space and pinpoint imaging and all the usual electrostatic buzzwords; I think it's about coherent timing, it's about making your foot tap, your fingers snap....
