Eldartford, thank you. I've been considering digital amplification. I have high hopes for this technology. With the exception of the eAR stuff, there has been a bit of buzz claiming that digital amps didn't do well into low impedances. Your contribution to this forum may help clarify this. Kudos, for sharing an insight that might otherwise not come to the attention of those who care.
Carver ZR 1600 drives low impedance
An interesting accident occured. I have been driving my MG 1.6 speakers through a biwire cable, where the tweeter wires are deliberately small so as to give a round-trip resistance of one ohm. This serves as the tweeter "padding" resistor of the crossover.
The tweeter wires developed a short circuit near the speaker end, so that the wire presented a resistance of one ohm to the power amp. Of course this one ohm was paralleled by the woofer resistance of 4 ohms, so the amp was seeing a load of less than one ohm.
This took me a while to figure out because the speaker sounded perfectly normal except that the high end was gone. I thought that the tweeter fuse had opened, because that is exactly what it sounded like. The problem is fixed, and no damage was done.
However, this experience suggests that the Carver amp is "happy" with low impedance loads such as presented by some otherwise excellent speakers.
The tweeter wires developed a short circuit near the speaker end, so that the wire presented a resistance of one ohm to the power amp. Of course this one ohm was paralleled by the woofer resistance of 4 ohms, so the amp was seeing a load of less than one ohm.
This took me a while to figure out because the speaker sounded perfectly normal except that the high end was gone. I thought that the tweeter fuse had opened, because that is exactly what it sounded like. The problem is fixed, and no damage was done.
However, this experience suggests that the Carver amp is "happy" with low impedance loads such as presented by some otherwise excellent speakers.
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