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How do you drive 12 Ohm speakers?

Lately I took home a pair of great looking and very impressive sounding Crystalvox (small russian brand) speakers. The speakers are big, use 3 8 inch woofers and have incredibly smooth highs. The problem is that they are rated 12 Ohm nominal and 8 Ohm minimal. With McIntosh the bass is rather loose. I put on my Mac 6900 on 8 Ohm and while I like the sound overall I can't help but wonder - what kind of amps do people usually use with 12 Ohm speakers?
antonkk

Showing 3 responses by macrojack

macrojack
1,303 posts
 
Perfect for OTL tube amps. Ask Ralph.
macrojack
1,303 posts
 
If you have a mismatch, wouldn't it be easy to just install a resistor in parallel across the speaker terminals to lower the impedance that your amplifier is seeing? Or use the optimal amplifier - an OTL.

Conventional tube amplification has a transformer to reduce the native output impedance of amplifier to the 8 ohm standard. OTL means output transformerless. In order to avoid output transformers and the problems they can introduce, some people choose to use an OTL and appropriately high impedance speakers. Since you have the 12 ohm speakers, you should talk with Atmasphere. He makes the amps you need.
macrojack
1,303 posts
 
OOPS!!! Looks like I found a way to tell everybody I'm no tech. Thanks for the correction, Ralph.
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