Which then is the next question, what is the goal of dispensing with the original design? As I understand it aperiodic damping is to lower qts and raising f3, but not so much as completely sealing the port would. I've read that the only reason to do this is to compensate for motors not strong enough to control the cone, in other words a fix for flabby bass. But the op here is asking about completely sealing the port if I read correctly. I'm not the expert on this so please weigh in with any corrections.
In googling this I came across a writer using metal discs with holes drilled in it to create the aperiodic damping. That got me wondering about the math. Again asking the speaker building experts here, is there any formula for restricting air flow in speaker ports? And shouldn't that have been done in original design? Thanks for any input.