16 ohm speakers: Pros & cons

Audiokinesis...You made a bunch of changes to your speaker system, so it's not definite that the improvement was due to the amp performing better with higher impedance. My review of amp specs shows that 4 ohm and 8 ohm distortion specs are the same, but 2 ohm specs (where the amp can do this) are usually degraded.

Gregm...A third advantage of 16 (or 32) ohm speakers is that lower gauge speaker wire can be used. This is a big factor if you are running 100 feet or more for some kind of a public performance, but would also apply to shorter audiophile cables.

My Dad's KLH Model 1 bass drivers/Janszen electrostats are 16 ohm. They do indeed sound better and are easier to drive with his 40Watt Citations vintage amps or with his McIntosh 2105 SS amp run on the 16ohm tap (autoformer)..His Krell KST100 although more powerful is not the best match for those speakers. Dont play as loud and actually have less bass with the Krell.

Hi Eldartford,

You're right that I made a lot of changes in that system as described, but I didn't give all the details of what I did. I used a Nakamichi active crossover in comparing the 4 ohm and 16 ohm configurations, which took the passive crossover parts out of the equation and levelled the playing field quite a bit more. But I had to build the passive 16-ohm crossover to see if it would sound better than my (optimized) passive 4-ohm crossover, which I'd tweaked to sound better than the generic second order active filter.

Later on I built a subwoofer and once again found the 16-ohm configuration to sound better (tighter), presumably due to the amp's higher damping factor into the higher impedance load. In this case, I did miss the extra headroom that the 4-ohm configuration gave me over the 16-ohm configuration.

In both of these examples, I was using relatively cheap solid state amplification, so the trend may not hold up for better quality amplifiers.

Recently I did a fair amount of experimenting in the course of designing a homebrew speaker system to work well with my parents' little JoLida tube amplifier. In this case, I found that a 16-ohm speaker driven off the 4-ohm taps sounded the best (I experimentd with 4, 8, and 16 ohm versions of the speaker using either one or two small full-range drivers). The differences between the different speaker impedances were somewhat subtle, but the difference between the 4 and 8 ohm taps on the amp was obvious and dramatic. That being said, I am not claiming that the 4 ohm taps will necessarily sound best in anyone else's system - but they sure did in this one.

Duke

Audiokinesis.... Transformer taps are another issue. How about experimenting with a driver that has a split (dual) voice coil, that you can hook up in series or in parallel. This would take just about everything out of the comparison except the voice coil impedance.