16 ohm speakers: Pros & cons

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.
.

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

Even with solid state amps that put out more power into lower impedance loads, sometimes you get better sound driving a higher impedance load. I remember years ago building a homebrew that had two woofers, which of course I wired in parallel. Just for fun one day I wired the woofers in series on one of the speakers, scaling the crossover components accordingly and padding the tweeter way down to match sensitivities. Adjusting for equal volume, the 16-ohm version sounded better on my inexpensive NAD integrated amp than the 4-ohm version did. The sound was more effortless is my recollection (that was over 20 years ago). For some reason (better damping factor maybe) that particular solid-state amplifer sounded better driving a high impedance load. Since I didn't listen very loud and didn't need the extra headroom, I converted the other speaker to 16-ohm configuration and left them that way until the speakerbuilding bug bit me again a few months later.

Duke