All about ohms

All About Ohms
David Szabados

Electrical resistance within speakers, amplifiers, as well as all basic electrical connections, is expressed in ohms, named after George Simon Ohm, a Germanphysicist. While we needn’t go into the background of him and his achievements, or even the heavy details about resistance, ohms, or impedance, this is an area that is often confusing to people. Thefollowing is a primer all about ohms and how it relates to speakers and amplifiers. My hope is that very simply, any confusion on the topic will be eliminated.
Parallel and Series

Electronics work onpositive (a.k.a. "hot") and negative (a.k.a. ground) forces. As such, single-voice coil speakers each have a positive and negative terminal; the cable that plugs into a cabinet also uses a positive andnegative connection; the jacks that are on the amplifier also have individual positive and negative connections. The circuitry running within the amplifier has various positive and negative connections.I’m not trying to sound redundant, but it is important to understand this simple idea.

Now, if we take a single 8 ohm speaker and attach it to another 8 ohm speaker, we can actually hook it up sothat its resistance in ohms can be one of two ratings. If we wire the positive and negative terminals of each speaker together, this is called a parallel connection. Parallel connections reduceoverall resistance, and as such the ohm’s rating would be halved to four ohms. What if we add another pair of 8 ohm speakers to the first pair and wire them all together the same way? The second pair of 8ohm speakers would be of course halved to four ohms. Then, when we wire the resulting two 4 ohm pairs together, this would of course bring the overall final resistance to 2 ohms.

Gustav RobertKirchoff (Königsberg, 12 de marzo de 1824 - Berlín, 17 de octubre de 1887) fue un físico prusiano cuyas principales contribuciones científicas estuvieron en el campo de los circuitos eléctricos, la...