Short answer is maybe, cut a hole, and if it doesnt work, plug it up.
I’m not an expert in speaker design, I just have a lot of experience as a bass player. There’s the physics of sound, and then there’s the way we hear, or “psychoacoustics,” and they aren’t always on the same team. I’m an not expert! This is what I think I understand.
When we hear any sound other than a machine generated pure sine wave, we are hearing a primary note and a huge range of “overtones.” It’s the overtones that make a violin and a piano and a guitar all sound different, even when they are playing the same note. The overtones are harmonic variations of the basic pitch. The low “E” string on a bass guitar sounds a fundamental note at 41 hz. But we also hear a LOT of higher frequencies in that note. The particular mix of overtones–the “overtone series”–is what makes different bass guitars sound different, or different violins sound different.
This is where psychoacoustics comes in. Our ears can use the overtone series to “fill in” for frequencies that aren’t there. A cell phone speaker does not reproduce much bass, but we hear a male voice as lower that actually is. Remember the old Barney Miller show theme? It had a famous bass part, started on an “F,” the second lowest note on a bass guitar, at 43 hz.:
http://www.televisiontunes.com/Barney_Miller.html
If you play that on your computer speakers–I’m hearing it right now on a laptop with two 1 inch speakers–you hear it as “bass,” but there’s really almost zero 43 hz content in it. Whta’s actually there is almost entirely much higher frequencies, but we hear an overtone series that we understand as “bass.” Bass players quickly learn that they way to be clear an audble is not to boost bass frequencies, but to mess with midrange frequencies–frequencies an octave higher than the actual note you’re playing.
What’s missing in LS sound is the bass frequencies–bass frequencies are really crucial but they are hard to manage. They take a lot of power and larger sizes. They’ll always be out of reach. So it seems to me the goal is to bump up or emphasize the midrange frequencies–those are much easier to reproduce.
here’s a good link on different approaches to speaker design:
http://www.bcae1.com/spboxnew2.htm
A sealed enclosure–if you put a cap on the back of the speaker, you are making a really small sealed enclosure–typically has to be really big to produce a lot of bass, whcih is why most speakers are “ported.” But it might be the case that making a bigger sealed enclosure would bump the midrange a lot–I know Raymann at the MLS forum makes sealed enclosures by attaching a long PVC tube.
It’s possible to calculate the values for this stuff, if you know the specs on your speaker. Typically, these are really hard to find for small speakers. If you don’t ave the actual specs for your speaker, it’s just guesswork
