Splain me passive radiators

[MattinMO]

Specifically tuneable passive radiators. I generally get the concept of passive radiators in increasing low freq response but I’m not really sold on it. Thinking about doing a Boston g5 12” with a tuneable radiator in my Audi.

What are the advantage/disadvantage over a nice port tune ?

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[THATpurpleKUSH 5,000+ posts]

G5s are garbage, I'll buy it for $50

 

[MattinMO]

G5s are garbage, I'll buy it for $50

That doesn’t answer my ? Sir smoke a lot

 

[poolman966554]

My only experience is with a dayton nd90. Its a 3" sub that i was learning with. Using recommended ported volume/tuning was ok, then used winisd to try a pr. It hits much lower / louder in the 30s than it did ported at 45hz.

Tuning is now the size of your sealed box, and ts parameters of your pr.. good thing is, box is smaller

Just shuffling around bandwidth imo. Give some here to gain some there. Just my experience

 

[THATpurpleKUSH 5,000+ posts]

That doesn’t answer my ? Sir smoke a lot

PR's are good for space saving when a port is not practical. Since they have a suspension, they have a physical/mechanical limit but if you have enough cone area then they will behave like a port. They generally roll off at -24db/oct like a port and unload below tuning.

 

[blazian87 10+ year member]

Specifically tuneable passive radiators. I generally get the concept of passive radiators in increasing low freq response but I’m not really sold on it. Thinking about doing a Boston g5 12” with a tuneable radiator in my Audi. What are the advantage/disadvantage over a nice port tune ?

I've had some experience with some tunable PR's. Here are a few good reasons you would wanna go this route.. You can achieve a low enough tune without sacrificing so much physical space on the actual port. That means you can make your overall box smaller. If you have enough space for a full length ported box without any restrictions, then I would say go for that instead as you'll save a lot of money from buying the PR's. A cool thing about PR's is that you can change your tune any time you want by changing out the weights. Adding weight lowers the tune, and taking out weight tunes it higher. You never have to worry about port noise or port shuffling with this kind of design. You would want to go with a ratio of 2:1 PR to sub but you can get away with 1 PR of a bigger size like 12" sub with 15" PR's if you're limited on space. So ultimately you would wanna go PR's if you limited on space trying to achieve a low tune that's what it comes down to, otherwise I would say it's too costly.