Posted by Wayne Parham on November 22, 2002 at 00:23:02

In Reply to: Re: SET's and 16 ohm JBL 2226J's- - - - - - Observations posted by spkrman57 on November 21, 2002 at 06:21:59:

The Zmax figure of 50 ohms commonly mentioned is actually pretty low. That's good, because it means load impedance doesn't fluxuate very much. It's not uncommon to see speakers with a peak impedance over 150 ohms. Cabinet tuning and configuration modifies impedance too, so the 50 ohms Zmax figure is to be seen as a rough guideline. It is a safe bet that a speaker with steady impedance when measured in free air will present a pretty constant load when further damped by the cabinet.

Many Altec woofers have very high peak impedance but they were used mostly with fairly powerful push-pull amps. Not many theaters used low power SET amps; That's more of a recent trend. And the Paramours are a SET amp, but they use a parafeed output circuit and are very insensitive to load. As long as the speakers are fairly efficient, they'll work pretty well on Paramours; I rarely hear people complain about low bass on this amp regardless of speaker impedance.