help with ohmage question

[hellatone]

The Classic 30 is a 16 ohm amp. There's an ext. speaker out line, which when you plug into it switches the amp to 8 ohms. I assume that what happens is that the two 16-ohm speakers -- the main speaker and the extension -- at that point are wired in parallel, giving 8 ohms. So far so good. However, one of the things I've heard is that if you simply plug into the speaker out line, without actually having a second speaker, the amp still switches to 8 ohms and this somehow improves the tone of the single 16-ohm speaker. As it turns out, doing this does indeed improve the tone. But it seems to me that at that point I'm sending an 8-ohm signal to a 16-ohm speaker, without having added added a second speaker to reduce the overall impedence shared by the speakers. So why does this improve the tone, and is it doing something bad to the amp or speaker? :smokin:

 

[LJ King]

Re: help with ohmage question

Mismatching the amp to the speaker in a tube amp by a factor of two up or down will not harm the amp or speaker.

Mismatching in this way will either affect the output power output or the bandwidth or both.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one ex-spurt that recommends that you will only be able to get maximum tone from your amp if you use the full winding of the output transformer - meaning the 16 ohm setting on your particular amp. Obviously you are not conforming to this ex-spurt's opinion.

As long as you like the tone, probably due to a restricted bandwidth - I say go for it.

 

[hellatone]

Re: help with ohmage question

Mismatching the amp to the speaker in a tube amp by a factor of two up or down will not harm the amp or speaker.

Mismatching in this way will either affect the output power output or the bandwidth or both.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one ex-spurt that recommends that you will only be able to get maximum tone from your amp if you use the full winding of the output transformer - meaning the 16 ohm setting on your particular amp. Obviously you are not conforming to this ex-spurt's opinion.

As long as you like the tone, probably due to a restricted bandwidth - I say go for it.

thanks for the advice -- and now that i have a better idea what's going on, i suspect what's being affected is the bandwidth -- the volume doesn't change but the tone does -- it softens and sounds more mellow, which i think means some of the high end gets knocked off :smokin: if i do add a second speaker so that i officially have 8 ohms going into two 16-ohm speakers wired in parallel, do i still get the slightly modified bandwidth?