With giant boxes or high tuning you can have a port of large vent area and shallow depth, but for normal sized boxes with low tuning the port would be very small in area and would make lots of noise.If you use big power you want to have a big enough port to keep the wind from wistling. I had a pair of polk mini monitors when i was in high school, they had .75" ports. I put them on a big amp once and the wistling was so loud they were chirping to the beat. In less nasty cases I have heard the term chuffing used, and thats what it sounds like.
Hmmmm, now for my questions:
I wonder if it would be ok to use small ports with low power, as excursion, and thus air displacement is considerably less at a handfull of watts.
Can a port be too big to load the system at low power? Should port size be closely coupled to the intended rate of flow to hit a specific optimal pressure range or flow rate range? (I mean, you couldn't use a garden hose nozzle on a bottle of windex) or is it a question of just being under the threshold of audible turbulence?
Thomas