speaker cab with the least cone excursion?

Actually, for bass, you want a lot of cone excursion. If the cone doesn't excurd enough, you have a guitar speaker, which sounds like pud with bass.

 

If the speakers are "waving" around, clearly visible (not a blur), chances are your amp/head is clipping. Try a bigger amp with at least double power.

The lower the frequency, the larger the excursion. Tweeters move only a tenth of a millimeter, yet they can damage your hearing like that. A subwoofer's cone may move an inch and you may hardly hear it. For bass guitar speakers, a quarter inch is normal.

 

Large excursions are the enemy of clean reproduction. Paul Klipsch was emphatic about this, which is why he turned to horn-loaded designs. However, everything is a tradeoff - it is very hard to move a lot of air with normal sized enclosures without a lot of cone movement. As a general guideline, the bigger the drivers you use, the better off you'll be relative to excursion.
- Mike

 

Yep. If you want low, you have to have a long excursion. Every octave lower requires 4x the excursion to maintain the same loudness.

A ported box tuned to the lowest desired frequency reduces cone movement to almost nil, and almost all the radiation comes from the port at that frequency. The maximum excursion in a typical ported box often occurs around the upper Golden Rectangle frequency (1.618 x Fob). For example, a box tuned at 31 Hz typically has maximum excursion around 50 Hz.

My theory about why this occurs in the above example is because the port begins to increasingly damp the driver from 50 Hz down to 31 Hz, which reduces cone movement accordingly. The loudness output remains fairly constant, because the port takes over the sound radation as it dampens the driver.

The same driver placed into a sealed box shows steadily increasing excursion with lower frequencies because there is no port damping applied to the driver.

 

My Eden CX410 has VERY little excursion.. i've put it on 70 % once, smacked my B-string and almost blew out the windows, but the speakers still didn't pop out...

 

:Crocodile Dundee voice on:
'ats a goo' spea'er
:Crocodile Dundee voice off: