Why do I need an enclosure
To understand why enclosures improve the performance of a low-frequency system, we must first understand how the driver produces low frequency information.
In audio, enclosures are used to enhance the speaker’s performance. Enclosures serve two important functions. They prevent acoustical short circuits of the speaker and assist the speaker's mechanical control.
In the early days of loudspeaker design. The enclosure purpose was only to prevent acoustical short circuits by separating the front output of the woofer from the rear output. Figure 1 With this type of enclosure application, the speaker's suspension parts, the spider and the surround, provide all the control over the speaker.
Figure 1
Then loudspeaker designers Henry Kloss and Edgard Villchur, at Acoustic Research, discovered that if the volume of air in the enclosure is decreased, the air remaining performs the function of a acoustical spring enhancing the performance of the speaker. Developing loudspeakers specifically for this application, Acoustic Research (AR) won rave reviews in the audio community. This was the first popular manufacturer’s use of an acoustic suspension enclosure design in mass production.
Since that time, many variations of enclosure designs have been incorporated using the air in the enclosure to aide the suspension of the loudspeaker and some later designs use the rear output of the loudspeaker to augment the front output for an increase in efficiency. These enclosures can be categorized into five different categories: Infinite Baffle, aperiodic, acoustic suspension, bass reflex and bandpass.
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