I have owned a pair of 12w3's, and a pair of Brahma 15's. My Brahma's require a nearly identical size box to the 12w3's. YES I know that JL suggests 1.5-1.75 for the 12w3's, but if you plot them out on WinISD you will see that they require a much larger box than what they say.
My point here, is that if you put the 12's in a suggested box, it won't sound AS good as with the bigger box. Typically, the smaller the box you put a sub in (compared to what they NEED) the sloppier it is gonna sound. So you could buy a Brahma 12, and put it in just under 1 ft3 (after sub displacement--so about 1.1 gross) it will sound MUCH MUCH better than a pair of 12w3's...and because of the design of the subs, the Brahma will do the low notes with a ton more authority than the w3's.
Truthfully, I would take a Brahma 10 over a pair of 12w3's any day. Port the Brahma in the right size box, tuned to the right frequency, and i think that it would walk all over the w3's in quality, and probably keep up pretty well with the w3's in output too.
Eric
