8 ohm home speakers

I have a pair of home cerwin vega speaker that need to be replaced, I want to know if i can replace them with a 4ohm car speaker intead of a 8 ohm home speaker and what is the difference. Can anyone explain the ohm rules?

The transistors used to power the speakers are ": balanced" to see a " LOAD " on the end of the wire. You ae dealing with impedance, ohms, resistance, amperage, and the dynamic curves of the output of the transistors. All these affect the " sound " quality of what you hear from the speakers. Without getting into nitty gritty details that audio gurus would discuss for hours, the most important thing in the physical hook up, is how will replacing the 8 ohms with 4 ohms affect the transistors? Some amplifier circuits actually state " 4 ohm or 8 ohm output " so you are dealing with a crude amplifier that doesnt care. On higher end equipment, though, putting in 4 ohms means that the transistors see 1/2 the " load " they expect and and are continually " shorted out ", using more current flow than they are designed for, which will cause overheating and shorter life. If the transistors are high quality, with huge heatsinks, and were over-designed in the first place by putting larger amperage values than " needed", then you can get away with it, since the over-powerful, high rated transistors can take the extra " short". If you have a unit with cheap transistors which are exactly rated for the output, with no reserve, and are not heatsunk at all or with tiny heatsinks, then you can rapidly overstress them to failure. An 8 ohm speaker will show that the coil of wire wound in the magnet on the back, is about 8 ohms.
A 4 ohm speaker will show about 4 ohms on an ohmeter setting on a typical meter. Since ohms is " resistance", less ohms means that the electricity travels more easily.
A good example would be a toaster. If you put an ohmmeter on the toaster, you find for example 10 ohms. You plug in the toaster and raw, 110 volts goes through the element, and heats it red hot. If you cut the element 1/2 as long, and plug it in, the element still has raw 110 volts, but now only has 5 ohms, and gets yellow hot to white hot, and will last only a short time before it burns itself up. The power generating station at the other end of the house wiring does not care about the huge amount of power being used, and will happily pump in power until the toaster is toasted. If you cut the wire to 1/4 the length the wire will immediately get white hot and probably blow out in front of you.
If you cut the long element in the toaster to just 1/4 inch length, and plug it in to 110, you will have almost NO resistance to the 110 ( 0 ohms ) and the element will light up like a lightbulb, and burn up with a bang.
Back to the amp. The amp is biased or balanced to see an 8 ohm RESISTANCE on the output of the transistors. Think of just shorting out the wires going to the speakers to zero ohms. People do this all the time accidentally with bare wire going into the clips, and the transistors, trying to put out x amps of power see a dead short and will try to put out infinite amps - they are only rated at X amps, and the over stress causes them to over heat, and burn out.. Putting in 4 ohms " One-Half " shorts out the transistors, causing them to try to maintain the pre-set amperage, by using more current ( amps ) than rated. ( it actually is not as simple as this, but close enough for demonstration purposes ).

hope this gives you a rough idea of what is involved without
getting overly technical..

2006-09-18 15:25:32 by josebikerider

This is clip 1 of 4 showing the detailed construction of a powerfull, carefully engineered, 8 ohm midrange speaker made from simple matterials. It ...

will connecting my receiver rated at 8 ohms be damaged if I hook up a pair of 6 ohm speakers to it? or vise versa?
this is a response to lilmamas question. what do you mean by going crazy with the volume? out of 100 i go to about 60 its that fine?

You can, just don't get to crazy with the volume or you will do more then blow a fuse you will kill the output transistors. Most good receivers will work fine down to 4 ohms but like i said don't go crazy with the volume.

2008-04-08 15:12:17 by Burninrock

Price: $140.00

150-watt maximum input power
New BRAVIA matching design
8-ohm speaker impedance
1" nano-fine balanced dome tweeter
New BRAVIA-matching design

I know I can add the speakers in series of 2 to get 8 ohm for each two but would it have any negative effect on my speakers and or on my amp if I do that?

Adding them is series will work, may not be that efficient though. Many newer amps/receivers are stable to 4ohms, some even lower. My amp will drive 2 ohm's mono bridged (I hate receivers).

on a side note the ohm rating is a little misleading, more like an average, thought that's kind of a weak answer. A speakers impedance (resistance in ohms) varies dramatically through the frequency range. A speaker may be 7 ohms at 800Hz and 3 ohms at 10kHz.

2006-08-03 21:49:45 by mkym111

Price: $53.99 $17.73

1.5 Kapton Bobbin Voice Coil
Cloth Edge Suspension
Excellent Repacement Woofer For Sound Music Reinforcement Systems
8 Ohms Impedance
25 oz. Magnet

I have some homemade speaker boxes, all they need is the sub woofer. I got the tweeter in there with a crossover. I found some 4 ohm 10" kicker subs for a good deal and was wondering if they would sound ok coming from a 8 ohm home pioneer stereo.

How good they would sound is up to the quality of the drivers. As far as it being OK, yes. 8 ohm rated stereos are stable to 4 ohms, and actually deliver slightly more power to a 4 ohm speaker load.

Go ahead and try it.

2009-02-19 07:32:48 by Jonathan S

If I hook up my 8 ohms home speakers to my car stereo 4 ohm amp will I fry my amp ? It sounds great

OHMs is the measure of resistance in an electrical circuit. Your amp is rated at a specific output at 4 ohms, your speakers produce twice that resistance. If you had 2 8 OHM speakers in that circuit, your resistance drops to 4 OHMs (parallel). In other words, you'll be fine. What you want to avoid is running LESS than 4 OHMs...

2006-12-02 10:02:34 by Michael