Lowering Ohms in speakers (1 Viewer)

[Allen Marshall]

I heard my brother talking about like...rewiring a speaker to get it to get it to lower ohms. 1 ohm specifically.

My questions are, can you do this? why do this? is it safe? why are speakers high ohms in the first place? what in the speaker decides its ohm resistance?

 

[John Garcia]

There is no real good reason to do it for most home speakers, IMO. A lower impedance load will draw more current from an amp, and as long as the amp can deliver that power, you are pulling more power from the amp; this isn't FREE though because you are driving the amp much harder. Most amps are designed to operate with a nominal impedance, and if you hook up speakers that are too low for the amp, it will generally either shut off or damage the speaker when the amp runs out of current (clipping). A speaker's impedance is determined by the combination of the nominal impedance of the drivers and the crossover. This is more common in car audio with subwoofers and amps that are stable to 1-2 Ohms.

 

[GrahamT]

You can lower the impedance of dual voice coil subs, not regular loudspeakers.
The resistance, inductance and capacitance of the voice coils decides the impedance of the speaker. So, if you placed a resistor in parallel, you could lower the impedance, but why?
Most amps will produce much more distortion at low impedance loads, most are designed to power 8 ohm speakers.

Edit: Johnny beat me to it

 

[Allen Marshall]

Both very good and understandable answers. Thanks guys.