Covering back of woofer with material

Quick question - Joe Akroyd of Royd audio, covered the back of the midbass drivers with some kind of material. I've read about this technique before but can't remember the details. The thing I'm most interested in is what it would do to the thiele small parameters?

I suppose I could get a driver out of the shed and do some experiments, but thought I'd ask here first (because it's easier).

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David Weems, in one of his designs, stapled fibreglass tightly over the back of a woofer to provide damping.

This allowed a reduction in the optimum volume of a ported enclosure by lowering the Q of the woofer.

He stated that this gave a controlled, natural sounding bass response.
 
It's a simple tradeoff, but hard to model. There are too many variables.
Easier to change treatments and measure.


In so-called aperiodic enlosures there are so many ways to implement your stuffed port-between two chambers, a la the big Dynacos, betwen box and room, behind driver, twixt it and the box, around the box perimeter(pseudo-cardioid), etc...


If you look in an old console, you'll see this technique used a lot.