Loudspeakers Under 4 Ohms

[EWorkshop1708]

I'm searching around on the web, but wanted some input from the diyAudio folks.

What good drivers do you know of that are under 4 ohms?

I mean drivers of all kinds, woofers, fullrange, midrange, tweeters, etc.

[AndrewT]

why?

[EWorkshop1708]

Originally posted by AndrewT
why?

I could think of a million possibilities.............

Multi-Speaker cabinets
Multi Driver surround sound
Theme Parks
High-Powered sound using batteries
Cellphone Speaker

and much more

[sreten]

Hi,

There are 2ohm car drivers but hifi speakers below 3 ohm I've never
heard of except for the occasional 1 or 2 ohm ribbon type drivers.

They are faily pointless in singles as they increase amplifier losses
and are difficult to drive, and of course in multiples parallel higher
impedance drivers can be used so again a pointless option.

/sreten.

[EWorkshop1708]

Originally posted by sreten

They are faily pointless in singles as they increase amplifier losses
and are difficult to drive.

/sreten.

IC chip amps seem to push 2 ohms nicely. For Car Audio or portable sound, a 2 or even 1 ohm speaker would be great. Even portable speakers for an iPod would be great at lower ohms so less batteries are needed for loud sound.

I used to have an old salvaged boombox that had 2.7ohm speakers, and if you used any other speaker, it wasn't as loud as the 2.7 ohm ones.

But I did search around, and found that some high end car audio speakers are 2 ohm.

[sreten]

Hi, my comments are regarding hifi drivers below 3 ohm, /sreten.

[AndrewT]

don't follow the car audio route.

For extra power, designing for low impedance is correct.
For quality and/or efficiency low impedance is bad.

If you want your batteries to last then use high efficiency and high impedance speakers.

[Cal Weldon]

What Andrew said.

[EWorkshop1708]

Have any of you ever saw a speaker with really thick coil wire?

Most speakers I have seen, have thin coil wire, only exception is this old MTX Thunder 8000 (4 ohm) I got free from someone. I had to re-glue the dustcap back on it, so I got to see the coil. Wire looked like 24awg, Looks like an awesome speaker, but I haven't used it yet because I'm looking for another sub for 20hz, and the MTX is just above 20hz a bit, despite the heavy duty speaker, and this speaker is designed to play loud, so it doesn't have quite the SQ of my old Sony sub I was using.

[5th element]

Most voice coils don't use thick wire simply because it's not needed. If you increase the wire thickness, sure you increase power handling, but you also increase the moving mass, lowering overall sensitivity. The loudspeaker drive unit plays a balancing act in its design, most of the time the coils don't need to withstand horrendous levels of power, so giving them the ability to is a waste of resources.

On the other hand my Peerless XLS sub drivers are supposed to be able to handle 300 watts continuous and the wire in these is much thicker, they are 8 ohm.