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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 2 responses by plato

plato
1,543 posts
 
Believe it or not, not every designer builds a speaker so that their potential customer's favorite tube amp will be able to drive it.

Also, there are now quite a few audiophile quality amplifiers on the market that can drive loads less than one ohm without breaking a sweat. Most well-designed digital amplifiers will do that with ease.

I recall that back in the day, the Strathearn ribbon drivers were very popular and they presented a load of around 1 ohm unless they were padded with performance-robbing resistors. Some amp designers actually designed amplifiers that would drive that harsh load to take advantage of the ribbon's sweetness and transparency. So this is really nothing new. One of my friends used to modify tube amplifiers to drive such low-impedance loads.
plato
1,543 posts
 
Duke, that sounds like a neat setup you had with the Eagle 2 and the Strathearns. Yes, if a single ribbon was 0.55-ohm it's no wonder I always saw them being used in a line source in conjunction with one or two other ribbons.

At that time, some of my friends were using the Strathearns with dynamic woofer systems and others were using the Acoustats with highly modified Acoustat servo-charge amps. I, myself had a set of 2+2's and a set of Monitor III's with the modified servo-charge amps. You just couldn't blow those things up (the speakers). Those were the days!
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