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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
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
12,276 posts
 
Bob_reynolds, its pretty easy when you've been doing for a living. If you look at the speaker, it is 12 ohms in the woofers and 8 ohms in the mids and highs. I had to surf their website a bit to figure out what speaker it is and it did not hurt to have someone on staff that knows a little Russian.

Anyway, an impedance curve like that is easy for tubes in general.
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atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
12,276 posts
 
Agreed! BTW this points to our discussion on the Doubling Down thread...
chryslers_rule
32 posts
 
Need a high damping factor, McIntosh will not do.
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.
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