Rear or front port?

[Speek]

I'm thinking about doing Zaph's Seas L18 / Seas 27TBFCG project for a friend. But she insists that they will be placed on wall-mounted (Vogels's) supports. This means that there will only be 7 cm space between the wall and the rear of the box. Zaph uses rear vented boxes, but in this situation would it be better to put the port(s) in the baffle?

[tarnationsauce]

Rear mounting a port does a couple things:

Makes corner loading more effective for low frequencies.
Reduces the appearance of port noise.
Allows a smaller enclosure face.

But...

Like you say, you cannot wall mount a rear ported enclosure.
The rule of thumb is to mount an enclosure the distance equal to the width of the port from the wall for the port to work as it was designed.

I think you'll be fine with front porting.
I once tested front, side, and rear porting before with a subwoofer I was designing. Tested with an RTA. I had more SPL, smoother response, and better LF extention with a front ported enclosure. But of course there are a TON of variables. With the particular design I was using, front porting was superior. Side porting was hideous! Rear porting was actually pretty close to front porting But there were a couple noticeable dips in frequency response. My only guess is it was from wave misalignment of those frequencies coming from the port and cone. Which makes sense because the rear mounted port is 180deg out of phase with the cone. In fact I'm supprised rear porting works as good as it does.