Well, what would be a good alternative to a giant chambered muffler. I used to have a truck with single chambers and they were pretty small. I'm just not working with a lot of room here and really not wanting to redo a big portion of the exhaust again.

I'm not sure to be honest. Chambered mufflers are (generally speaking) Piss poor for turbo applications. The aero is a little bit different though, it is technically a strait through muffler, it will pass the golfball test, but it has an expansion chamber and louvres to reintroduce the expanded exhaust gas into the stream. They claim it creates a scavenge effect. I'm a skeptic, but I like to blaze new ground when there isn't really any foreseeable downside. Also, there are dyno charts to back it up :).

Three isn't much choice when it comes to high-performance no restricion turbocharger exhausts. Strait pipe with a fart can. Strait pipe with a perf-tube packed muffler, or (possibly) strait pipe with the aero. Pick your poison.

a straight through muffler will pass a tennis ball test... a chambered won't...the thing will enter and probably never come back.

http://www.boostedmiata.com/gallery2.../parts+004.jpg

winsauce.

Tennis ball test?

Well, how is it that some cars such at an evolution or wrx can have a straight pipe with a canister and have a very distinct and well rounded exhaust sound but other cars sound very plain or like ass with one? Is it the displacement?

No, it is the cylinder head, exhaust manifold, and engine configuration. Boxer motors sound like they do because of their extremely unequal length headers. If you replace them with equal length, they sound like most other 4 cylinder cars. The exhaust port shape,size, and angle has a lot to do with it, as does the camshaft profile.

the diameter of a tennis ball is 2.7"...

If you want to solve the problem of your cute miata sounding like a Honderp, just figure out a way to get the lengths of all exhaust runners to be completely unequal. Say you run 2 ports all the way around the engine, for example. :3

Splitime's exhaust sounded badass because of his unequal length tubular manifold.

yeah i have a xr-1 on my car, now keep in mind my engine is pretty hardcore, and cam'd out. and my exhaust is 3" turbo back with nothing but that muffler. its pretty raspy if you ask me. it flows good. but there isnt much to it. i do like it better then my old 2.5" side pipe lol if you go to my build thread and watch a vid you can hear it

I had a straight through 5x8" oval magnaflow on my turbo se-r plus a 22" resonator (3" exh) and it had the same honda-ish drone as described above and it was too loud for my taste. I switched to an oval borla with the dogleg design (similar to what brain posted above) and it was 100x better even though I didn't add a resonator. There was no more drone and the tone was much deeper and more mellow. I'm going to be installing Savington's old Enthuza system with an ansa muffler on my car soon and I have a feeling I'll regret not keeping that borla for the miata.