8 ohm 4x12 vs 16 ohm 4x12 - any difference??

[Vrad]

Man, now Im wishing I was getting 16 ohm speakers

Josh and Scott are gonna kill me if I call and change the order. I have been nothing but a pest to them guys during this whole ordeal

DO IT!
Change it to 16 ohms.

Just called and changed it

Gonna be another couple weeks before they get speakers in though

Yeah... It's worth the wait man. The QR with that cab is fantastic.

 

[Meathead]

Sounds like someone around here may be talking through a hat, or a sock, or maybe a legging...unless a clip is posted up, it's all horseradish!!! YAAAA!

Post it up or you won't be taken seriously around here. This is your first warning.

Clipman

 

[thegame]

One thing that usually gets overlooked in threads like this is the wire used for the coil windings in the speaker.

It's probably been 6 or 7 years since I read it, but a long time ago someone posted a bunch of information explaining that a 16ohm speaker and 8ohm speaker weren't identical... which should be obvious considering the impedances measure different. The gist of it (I'm not an expert, but maybe someone else can chime in) is that speaker manufacturers sometimes have to use different wire gauges to get the different impedances whist getting the coil to fit in the same chassis. This creates small variances in between the two speaker types.

The dude went into way more technical detail, but my mind is too fried to remember all that shit.

However... as an example Eminence actually gives details of their 8 and 16ohm speakers separately. I pulled up the .PDF on their Wizard speaker, and right off the top it lists a different resonance for each one (89Hz/8ohm vs 100Hz/16ohm), usable frequency range (70Hz-5.5kHz vs 70Hz-6kHz) and sensitivity (103dB vs 103.5dB).

Further, if you compare the chart on each speaker you can see that the response isn't identical and by the looks of it the 16ohm version will be a brighter speaker.

Anyway, here's the link to the .PDFs...

http://eminence.com/pdf/wizard.pdf
http://eminence.com/pdf/wizard-16.pdf

+1 Thats exactly it. Different ohm models of the same type are built differently, albeit slightly. Also taken from the plexi board thread : I understand that 8 ohm speakers use a different gauge wire in their voice coils, using less windings than a 16 ohm voice coil

No sane person will argue that using a different guage wire in a pickup, or different windings around a transformer core will sound the same. As we all know, there is an entire boutique industry (for pickups mainly but to a lesser degree transformers) out there exploiting these differences. So why wouldn't a different wind around a speaker's voicecoil result in an inherently different tone, however slight ? Bottom line is if something is constructed to different specs, its going to sound different.

And yes, using different transformer taps and wiring methods also contribute to the difference.