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Very low speaker impedance

Hi folks, I would like to know what is the reason that some speaker designs have such a low impedance. For example the lowest impedance of Kinoshita studio monitor speakers is less than 1 ohm (near short)! Why does the manufacturer choose for this kind of ridiculously low impedances? Do speakers with low impedances sound better than speakers with normal (between 4-8 ohm) impedance? Some of those speakers do sound excellent: Apogee Scintilla, Kinoshita studio monitors, the old Thiel CS5i. If the answer to this question is: yes, then most today's speaker manufacturers are compromising the sound of their designs for a more benign impedance behaviour, so the consumers won't be having trouble with their amplifiers. With other words, the choice would be a commercial rather than audiophile one. Are there speaker designers out there who want to give their response?

Chris
dazzdax

Showing 5 responses by dazzdax

dazzdax OP
599 posts
 
Let me put it this way (and this would be my last question before I shut up): Is it with today's technology necessary to implement an ultra low impedance into ones design to get excellent sound?

Chris
dazzdax OP
599 posts
 
Thank you for your explanation. Does this mean that in fact a low impedance design gives a more fast and dynamic response (with the restriction that one should use a kilowatt amplifier)?

Chris
dazzdax OP
599 posts
 
Fellow audiophiles, let's ask another question: very low impedances are extremely demanding with regard to amplification. Do many speaker manufacturers choose for a "safer" (more benign) impedance behaviour even if they know a low impedance design would be better instead sonically? This choice is of course strongly influenced by marketing strategies, because otherwise their products would be very hard to sell (many amplifier and tweeter failures :-) ).

Chris
dazzdax OP
599 posts
 
Ok, thank you all. I was just wondering why some speaker builders are designing speakers with ultra low impedances (probably they want to look which amplifier would be able to drive or to survive them..., just kidding). I think nowadays the speakers with true 1 ohm (or less than 1 ohm) impedance are very uncommon, do you agree? Probably this has to do partly with advances in driver technology, because the peak incidence of such ultra low impedance speakers was mainly situated during the eighties (Apogee, Thiel, Wilson, Kinoshita).

Chris
dazzdax OP
599 posts
 
After the elucidating words from Mlsstl, Johnk, Rademaker and others it is clear to me that the impedance issue is only important if you take other parameters of speaker design into account. But I want to put something right here: you have to agree that a 1 ohm or lower than 1 ohm design mandates the use of very rugged amplification. Only a small group of amplifiers are up to the task (Krell, some of the class-D amps, FM Acoustics, Rey Audio to mention a few). This means that those extreme low impedance designs are not for most audiophiles simply because they don't have super rugged amplifiers like the ones I mentioned. Of course this has nothing to do with sound quality.

Chris
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