2026-06-11 · Design
Why the cabinet is sealed
A port buys you loudness for free and charges for it later, usually against the wall you were always going to put the speaker against.
A ported cabinet has a tuned hole in it. Near the tuning frequency the air in that port moves with the cone and radiates alongside it, which buys several decibels of output for no extra amplifier and no bigger driver. It is a genuinely good trick and most speakers use it.
What the trick costs
Below the tuning frequency the port stops helping and starts unloading the driver, so excursion climbs quickly where the cone has the least control. The roll-off is steeper than a sealed cabinet’s, and the group delay around tuning is longer, which is the part people describe as bass that arrives slightly after the note.
The practical cost is simpler than any of that. A port radiates in whatever direction it faces, so a rear-ported speaker pushed against a wall gets a boost you did not choose, at a frequency you cannot move, in a room you have already measured.
The trade we took
Skala 3 is sealed. It gives up perhaps three decibels of maximum output at the very bottom and gets back a gentler roll-off that the room correction can work with, and a cabinet that behaves the same on a shelf, in a corner and on a stand.
Given that the speaker measures your room anyway, a shallower roll-off you can correct is worth more than free output you cannot place.
If you want the bottom two octaves back, that is what Skala Low is for: it joins the group like any other speaker and takes the low end off the ones already in the room.
