16 ohm speakers: Pros & cons

Pros: They work well with tube amps that have high output impedances. Especially most OTL types.

Cons: They will not play as loud with solid state amps that have lower power output into a high impedance load.

Snofun3: "Ohm rating is not an indication of goodness or badness, it's a measure of driver efficiency.
A 16 ohm speaker will take more amp power to drive."

Right, wrong, and wrong.

Absolutely, nominal impedance is NOT a qualitative measure of a speaker system.

System impedance is NOT an indicator of speaker-system efficiency or sensitivity.

High-impedance systems generally consume LESS amplifier power.

I think Twl correctly stated the meaningful differences.
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The advantage to me is that my favorite speaker to date is 16 ohm (my Tonian lab TLM-1's) As stated above... TWL and Jeffeybehr have it right.
If someone else's favorite is 4ohm... great!

Compared with and 8 ohm speaker, a 16 ohm speaker requires that the amplifier put out twice the VOLTS for a given power, because it draws half the amps. Solid state amps are limited by the volts they can output...within reason (and until a fuse pops) they can hold up this voltage regardless of the current drawn. Thus their wattage rating increases for lower impedance speakers. Tubes have high voltage capability, but can output little current, therefore tubes are usually interfaced using a step-down transformer which trades off voltage for current. This transformer has different taps (connection points) on its secondary winding so as to match different speaker impedances, so that the amp will work equally well with any impedance.

In the non-audiophile world, where solid state amps reign, 16 ohm speakers have the advantage that you can hook four of them up in parallel, and still have only a 4 ohm load.

Eldartford above, beat me to posting the second advantage of 16ohm drivers. Twl explained the first one:). Cheers