The "box" in a loudspeaker system serves one or more of several useful purposes, most having to do with low frequency reproduction. Since vibrating membranes like loudspeaker cones produce sound from both the front and the back, and since sound from the back is 180 degrees out of phase with sound from the front, if the speaker has no enclosure, the sound from the back will cancel the sound from the front and the bass will be very weak. Ported enclosures cause the wave from the back to invert in phase and emerge in phase with the wave from the front. Unfortunately, they are very frequency selective and usually have a series of resonance and antiresonance nodes. Infinite baffles try to just prevent the back wave from reaching the front. Acoustic suspension speakers use the air pressure trapped in a relatively small box to control the cone motion in additon to preventing it from emerging out of phase and canceling out the front wave. Horn enclosures are the mechanical equivalent of electrical transformers efficiently coupling the energy from the front of the speaker to the room by providing a suitable back pressure at the narrow end of the horn to load the driver efficiently while providing a transition to a low pressure end which couples efficiently with a large room. Enclosureless speakers like Magnepan magneplanar types have to take special measures to overcome this out of phase problem. They are probably effectively back to back drivers in a bi polar configuration having the back wave emerge in phase with the front wave instead of out of phase. There are many others clever enclosure ideas like isobaraks which have an inner driver to effectively increase the effective size of the enclosure for loading purposes without increasing its physical size. I don't see how you can glibly dismiss the role of a loudspeaker enclosure. One thing all of them have in common. The guy who builds them does NOT want them to add spurious resonances to the sound of his speaker.

"In addition, damping is "stupid" in the sense that it removes both the sounds you want and the ones you are trying to get rid of."

Once again this kind of statement flies in the face of accepted and well proven facts. This should be especially evident to anyone who tries to design an acoustic suspension speaker system like A/N K. Of the three parameters which control the frequency response of a loudspeaker; mass, springiness, and damping, the internal damping material used to control overshoot of the cone is the only thing that prevents it from exhibiting boomy undamped resonances. This is a direct application of Newton's second law of motion applied to the phenomenon of forced resonance. It is presented in every freshman college physics textbook along with its solution and explanation. BTW, it is one of the most widely used equations for analyzing and designing mechanical systems including for example the suspension on your car. For ported systems, the driver suspensions are usually much tighter so the damping can be done mostly by the driver itself. The box can be "tuned" to any frequency desired given the right dimension and internal configuration. I'd like to see a cutaway view of the A/N J and E series which are two way 8 inch ported designs. The extremely low claimed low frequency cutoff suggests a kind of transmission line loading to tune the relatively small cabinet to such a low frequency.

I do not and will not post on AA. For me the site is unacceptable. As I said on the cable message board, I posted there for a short time many years ago. I was not thrown out, I left on my own but had I stayed, the outcome would not have been in doubt.