ported vs. sealed vs. bandpass

between ported, sealed and bandpass boxes what are the best? ive heard that bandpasses are the best, but why? are they better than ported?

All depends on how it is designed and what you are looking for... I personally love sealed boxes...

People love ported boxes.

bandpass are great if you know how to build it and have tested your car for peaks etc. It would be cool to see one of these properly designed for a sq car :)

how do you figure out all the tuning stuff and what size your port should be for a ported box.. because i know that it is best to tune your port to a certain frequency but how do you figure that out.. and what exactly does that do?

depends on your goal. there is no correct answer. there are good suggestions though. lol

There is a formula for finding the corect tuning frequincy. ive posted it in other threads. you can also find it on JLaudio.com under tutorials. IMO properly ported sounds jsut as good as sealed with an average of 3dB gain. i say ported all the way. it is very hard to properly build a bandpass enclosure as there have only been correct formulas for 4th order band pass which is the lest efficent of the band pass enclosures (only uses sound from one side of the cone). i have seen properly build 6th order bandpas enclosures but it took alot of luck and alot of building and rebuilding....