What does Nominal Impedance mean?

But if 8 ohms is optimum then why are there so many 4-ohm speakers? I put together a DIY speaker a while back and I was able to use all 8-ohm speakers. So, the drivers are out there.

impedance of a speaker is one of many design parameters that speaker designers trade off in very complicated ways

think of speaker impedance very roughly as how much work an amp needs to do.... you can put in a few simple drivers and a minimal crossover in an undamped box, and the amp will have a super easy time doing the work, but how will it sound? (if this were so easy, we would all have speakers like this...) - but easy to drive, simple lightweight drivers will distort when pushed and don’t have broad, controlled, flat frequency response (they shout, they ring, they break up...)

so the designer uses more robust drivers, and more of them, then this complicates the crossover and cabinet design, all of which makes for more work for the amp... more stuff to grip, to stop and start, to deliver current into (how the amp does the work...)

so the designer says, well, mister speaker owner, you want better super clean sound, full range response, plenty of power handling to play loud AND clean... so i have had to do all this to my speaker design -- include all these well damped drivers, put in a well tuned box, match them all, filter them all superbly with a complicated crossover -- to give you the performance you want... but hey now, you gotta use a strong amp to do the work to get that sound...

whenever i see 3 way tower speakers with 3-4-5-6 drivers, multiple woofers, think of an amp needing to grip it all (think big focals, magico, thiels)... there is alot of work to do (compared to say a single driver speaker) so you can bet the impedance will be lower... not to mention the efficiency

tradeoffs....

Lower impedance = higher current = more output.  Since most solid state amplifiers can drive 4 Ohms without issue as a speaker designer I might chose a lower impedance driver to give me more output. Especially in matching say a woofer to tweeter, when tweeters usually have more output for the same voltage. 

AFAIK there's no actual standard for rating your speakers, and some like modern KEF speakers, are so optimistic in rating their speakers that you can't use them to pick matching amps at all. 

jjss49, erik_squires,

Thanks for that very good information. It’s interesting and confusing at the same time.

ozzy

At Townshend Audio we match the average nominal speaker impedance (around 8oHms) with the impedance of the amplifier using Isolda 'impedance matched' Speaker Cable. Here we explore the reasoning behind our cable products: https://townshendcable.com/ 

Our Analysis uses a test set-up to prove how mismatched speaker cables will cause audible differences between a range of cables.

Thanks for your time.

Harriet Townshend

townshend-audio,

Is that the same for the F1 speaker cable?

ozzy