Tube Radio Restomod - Small design - looking for feedback

So I know the "which speaker is best in a tiny enclosure" question is probably one that drives the regulars crazy, but here we go:

I'm building an old radio (minerva allegro if you're curious: Link) and I'm using this as a bit of a "test and play" situation as I have a much nicer radio that I want to perhaps keep some of the original radio/amplification components of, while building a hybrid circuit eventually. But, I wanted to start with something I didn't care as much about and learn a bit about analog circuits with tubes before I start trying to design something. In the end, my use case for this is that I want to get a functional single speaker system that I can have in the bedroom and hook into my wireless music LMS/Picoreplayer systems. For my first attempt at this, I'm stripping all of the tubes out except the magic eye, and trying to build a clock/radio with modern speaker/amplifier. Clock is a nixie tube clock that I'm just going have poking out the top of the radio. From the original designthe speaker is "back mounted" with a through hole size of 130mm or 5", and even so, a decent portion of the bottom of the speaker is blocked (hole has a flat bottom so it's 130x85) due to the radio tuning band in the original design.

I'm space limited in that way, but then also in volume. As I see it, I'd be lucky to have 4L at the end, and that is with building the enclosure into the existing walls of the radio, which are only 6mm thick. My current preference would be to use the mark audio pluvia 7 (and yes, singular, this will be a mono setup). I don't think I have the space to do a bass reflex, but then I'm curious if I'd get better low end extension and overall better sound out of a slightly smaller speaker that is not being partially "blocked" with a more complex enclosure design.

The alternative would of course be to create a 2way, much like a bookshelf on it's side. I have a small desire to play around with some ribbon tweeters, but I would keep the same problem of 5 inch mid woofer that is partially blocked, or a smaller driver that isn't.

Just hoping to hear thoughts and if anyone has any measurements or feedback on the"partially blocked" speakers and how significant or not it is to the sound in the end product, I'm all ears.
 
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In such a small space it will be hard to get bass, most luck will be with a higher qts driver in a sealed or open back cabinet (then very high qts). I had a Grundig radio like that, and still got the drivers and their QTS is like 1.7, but they did give some bass in a open back system that was less than 4L. The cabinet fell appart and the radio itself (a very early transistor radio with germanium transistors) died.