icepower as1200 and electrical impedance.

[Ema79]

Good morning everyone. I was looking for a pair of woofers to include in my speaker project, and I finally found a pair that suited my needs. But they have a 16-ohm impedance. So I looked at the specifications of my low-frequency amplifier, an IcePower 1200 AS2, but I couldn't find anything about 16-ohm impedances.
The question is: is this amplifier suitable for 16-ohm loads? If so, does it perform better or worse than a 4-ohm or 8-ohm load? Thanks so much for your help.

 

[Mart68]

It will work fine, it will put less power into them but that's not an issue as that amp has a lot of power.

Only thing I'd be cautious of is that if they are vintage drivers they may have very low power handling.

 

[DVDdoug]

Assuming the voltage remans the same the power will be cut in half when the impedance doubles (inversely proportional). I can see from the specs that the power is half at 8-Ohms compared to 4 which means the voltage is holding constant and you can expect 300W.

16-Ohms isn't common and they are likely "intended" to be used in parallel. Two in parallel is 8-Ohms and you'd get 300W per-speaker. And you can get the same performance with one amplifier driving both. Four 16-Ohm speakers in parallel would be 4-Ohms and still 300W per speaker.



...Some amplifiers can't put-out the "expected" increased current, the power won't increase inversely proportional to the impedance and it will clip at a lower voltage. Many amplifiers can't put-out double the power at 4-Ohms so I'd say the ICE power is a good design! (If the impedance is too low for a particular amplifier it might burn up or go into thermal shut-down.)

 

[Ema79]

Hi, thanks for the detailed reply. In my project, I don't need to run multiple drivers in parallel; I simply need a good driver to use in a closed box. In the pro world, it's difficult to find a good driver with a Q factor of around 0.40 suitable for this purpose. So my search is limited to two or three drivers, including two 16-ohm ones.