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The bass boom you hear is likely a combination issue. First, if there was foam in the ports, that does affect the bass tuning so that will need to be fixed. The other likely cause is your room. Try moving them around to different spots in the room as an experiment to see if the boominess changes at all.
Before investing in any sort of crossover updates or mods you may wish to consider simply plugging the port on one of the speakers... particularly if you have one that is near a boundary like a wall behind it or a corner. That will still allow some bass from that 'plugged' speaker but way less lower bass, which may be overloading your room. Just a thought. The other speaker's unplugged port will probably give you plenty of low end.
Hi dennnic welcome to AudioCircle.Given that other than some bass issues you "really liked what I heard when I brought them home" and "they sound really nice" I would suggest letting your local speaker builder do the crossover upgrade rather than redesign the crossover. You like their basic sound this will enhance that rather than let local speaker builder turn them into his idea of HiFi. Regarding the bass issue. Ask local speaker builder about the quality of the inductors in the woofer circuit. Good inductors are expensive because of the copper in larger gauge wires. Smaller gauge wire inductors are a common design compromise to meet a price target. Spending extra Euros on heavier wire gauge air core inductors in the bass circuit may well help. Your description "kind a lose rhythm here and there" leads to speculation that woofer filter inductor(s) are saturating robbing power before it can reach the woofers.
Different speakers can be expected to behave differently. Most recommend at least 1 meter between loudspeaker and any walls. What are the dimensions of your room (small/square rooms can be horrible for bass boom). Can you post a link to your new loudspeakers? You state bass isn't as deep as you'd expect and yet at the same time a bit boomy. That is characteristic of ported designs that were popular in the U.S. back in the 70's, a bass hump with quick roll off. I'd be leery of redesigning the crossover, unless he takes cabinet volume and woofer parameters into account. Did he discuss any of this with you?Lining the ports was probably done to reduce port chuff (distortion at high volume levels). Just for fun, I'd try stuffing the ports with socks and hear if you prefer it.
What can I say about my room, its small/medium in size, kind of square, with furniture right "at" the walls, can't really see how to make it any worse. Setting the speakers 1 meter away from walls and (even more) from corners does seem to produce good results. The downside of such a placement (in my experience so far) is that music sounds great only at a given sweet spot. As soon as I move 1 meter forward or back, I get bass "holes" or bass gets too loud close to walls. To combat those dreadful bass holes I tend to move the speakers as close to rear wall as possible (~20 cm). That does help in extending the sweet spot area, but also gets bass amplified. I adjust it in equalizer to some point, but the whole soundstage gets choked in bass. However, plugging the ports works wonders!! Very tonally balanced sound. It did make the bass considerably weaker, so to say. Maybe the designer put that port there to squeeze a db or two more out of the cabinets. He didn't go into details about that. I think I'm going to listen to that advice as well and do just the capacitor replacement. Do you think it could be a DIY project for someone who's never done it?
Unfortunately many listening rooms are small/squarish. No good solution for such rooms. Best to use small monitors to avoid overloading the room with bass and improve coherency (enlarge the sweet spot where fewer drivers can coalesce). Yes, moving them will change bass response. All rooms, especially small/squarish rooms have huge bass peaks/dips. EQ can only solve the problem at a single location and won't help with the muddiness you're hearing. The best in-room bass solution is to use multiple carefully placed subwoofers (not cheap to get subwoofers that will go down to say 20 Hz). They should be located in the corners or along the middle of each wall. The second best solution is use of absorption panels (but very few are effective down into bass regions, check the material data). Yes a capacitor replacement can be DIY if you can use a soldering pencil. While you're replacing old capacitors spend a little more for better caps, they'll sweeten up the sound.
