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
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