Rear Ported versus Non Rear Ported floor standing

A sealed design may be the best way to go (if you can find one you like), and if you must place the speakers that close to the wall. If you go with a ported design...I'd go front port.

Dave

I'm using Spendor S8es which have a rear port and are only about 8" from the rear wall without any problems. (I had the smaller Spendor S5e prior to that and they had no issues either.) Spendor makes a point that their slotted linear flow port is designed to be less sensitive to placement near to a rear wall than some other designs. My experience supports that statement.

Of course, the best thing to do with ANY speaker is to try it in your listening room and see what you think of it before you buy.

The fact that a speaker is rear ported is immaterial. Most of the energy is coming out the front of the speaker. A port acts as a camber to lower the resonant frequency and increase the efficiency of the design.

In my 20 years of professional experience it depends on the room as well as the speaker how the sound will interact.

Also with many rear ported speakers you can try an old trick of stuffing things in the port to change the loading. Many companies include pre made bass plugs for this very purpose.

We used to use tubes from paper towels in a pinch which sometimes tightened the bass and dissappated bass bloat.

Really matching a speakers bass output with room size is much more relevant. If a speaker goes too low for a room to contain the bass the speaker can produce you are in for standing room city, which is worse than a little extra bass bloat by putting a rear ported speaker in a cabinet!

You should look for manufacturers that design for this issue. Some front ported and non-ported speakers will still sound awful if shoved into a corner or rear wall.

>>If a speaker goes too low for a room to contain the bass the speaker can produce you are in for standing room city, which is worse than a little extra bass bloat by putting a rear ported speaker in a cabinet!<<

This is a huge assumption and mostly hifi wives tale. Standing waves in the bass regions are mostly a function of diaphramic losses and in reality no playback room is big enough to properly handle the bottom octave.

In a very truncated nutshell, you can have great bass behavior, even down to 16Hz in a small room. Standing waves will likely be more of an issue in small rooms with bass in the 50Hz to 80 Hz range.

I recommend you bone up on this a little. There are a couple references that will help you understand better:

One is "Fundamentals of Acoustics", Third of Fourth Edition
Wiley press

The other is Harry F. Olson's book. It contains less math, fewer proofs and is totally solid; easier to understand if you do not have a strong math and physics background.