Welcome to the forum, Woohoo, and I hope you have fun with the sub this weekend.


Keep in mind that the plate is a power amp, and that amp produces heat. The external plate of these amps is the amp's method of heat rejection. That's why you will find that even very expensive subs have their plate amp (and its connections) exposed on one side. Concealing the plate (and its connections) would be a fairly expensive hassle and would require the sub to grow - the cover would have to be added externally to avoid pushing the amp inward and encroaching on the sub's internal volume. The only effective way to avoid that is to have a passive sub and a separate power amp, but that's pretty rare these days.


The ECS-10 did just that. They went from a ported design (which requires the size you see to achieve the performance you hear) to a sealed design (which can function with a smaller internal volume, but requires more power to compensate for the lack of a port and thus leads to higher cost). Ported subs with large drivers are inherently big boxes.

As for the double-boxing and the fabric cover (Paul Bunyan's pillow case - great description), I don't blame them for being careful. There's been a somewhat recent example of a sub company choosing to skimp on their boxing, and the result was a pronounced uptick in shipping damage between the factory and the consumer. The fabric cover could also have been plastic, but the underlying goal is to protect the finish of the sub. The plastic wouldn't have been any use either after the sub was out of the box.