In the early days of high-performance car audio, if you wanted low bass in your car, you had to find a raw or stand-alone subwoofer and figure out how to build an enclosure for it. Today, if you want the best possible bass in your ride, well, you still have to buy a raw subwoofer and build an enclosure for it. The good news is that dedicated car subwoofers are plentiful these days and you can find a huge amount of information available on how to build proper enclosures (some of it is just a click away on the Internet).
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| Raw Subwoofer |
The purpose of a subwoofer box or baffle (a panel that holds a sub in place in a vehicle, such as a rear deck) is to separate the front sound wave (created when a subwoofer’s cone moves forward) from the back wave (when the cone moves backwards). Acoustically speaking, the front wave and back wave of a speaker are mirror opposites of one another. (They are 180 degrees out of phase, in tech speak.) Without a box, the output from the rear wave cancels the output from the front wave, and vice versa, so you lose most of the output of the sub.
The relationship between an enclosure and a subwoofer is much more complex than just separating the front and rear waves. In the most simple terms, the air in an enclosure acts as a spring to provide resistance against the movement of a subwoofer’s cone, and subwoofers are designed to work optimally within a given range of cone resistance.
The amount of air space required in an enclosure can range from less than a cubic foot to several cubic feet. In addition, certain subwoofers are designed to work best in certain types of enclosures. A sub that’s designed to work, say, in a small sealed enclosure won’t perform as well in a large vented enclo¬sure. But the general trend in car audio has been to design subwoofers that work well in small enclosures so that they can better fit into a vehicle.
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