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Impedance - The most ignored and useful measurement tool

I’m constantly reading about audiophiles diagnosing their speakers or attempting to mod their crossovers with expensive new parts. The one tool I wish they’d all get and rarely do is an impedance graphing tool. These are either nearly free or affordable.

They let you produce impedance charts like Stereophile does, as well as measure capacitors and inductors with ESR/DCR respectively.

In the nearly free variety you can build one and use Room EQ Wizard. In the affordable is the Dayton Audio V3. Either one does an excellent job of measuring a driver, crossover parts and the entire speaker as well. Completely irreplaceable tools.

Diagnosing your speakers with the help of others on the internet is made so much easier when you have one of these. Even if your speakers are fine, measure them and keep the charts handy for when they do go bad, it will make it much easier to understand what is and is not working. Replacing a cap/coil? Measure them and the speaker before and after when you are done to make sure everything came back together properly.

You’d be surprised how many speakers have a woofer or tweeter that has stopped working but the listeners don’t even realize it.  These are immediately visible problems in the impedance plot.

Of course, it's just a tool, but when a driver goes bad, or a solder joint fails the impedance charts will go wildly off track.  It's up to you to dig in and diagnose further.

erik_squires

Showing 1 response by richardbrand

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richardbrand
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@erik_squires 

I've been at this a long time and just today realized there was such a thing as negative impedance

Negative impedance must cause those pesky electrons to speed up.  Possibly a battery?

@lanx0003

If you look carefully at your graph, you will see a second vertical scale on the right hand side, calibrated in deg (degrees).  The bottom curve is indeed the phase angle, centred around zero, and swinging plus and minus about 35 degrees.

Ever wonder why VA is often used instead of Watts?  If the Voltage and Current in an AC circuit do not peak in unison, they have a time shift which can be measured as a phase angle.  Useful power in Watts is V A cos(phase) which is only equal to VA for resistive loads (the phase angle is zero).

The amplifier has to provide additional power to make up for capacitive and inductive losses.

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