4 ohm to 8 ohm wiring

[michael bustamante]

Is there a way to wire two 4 ohm speakers to trick the factory radio into thinking its playing one 8 ohm speaker?

[slowcpe]

Wire then into series to get 8ohm. Parallel will get you a 2ohm load.

[michael bustamante]

Great thanks. I never can remember wiring tricks to play with ohms. Appreciate it

[Fitz]

Originally Posted by michael bustamante

Is there a way to wire two 4 ohm speakers to trick the factory radio into thinking its playing one 8 ohm speaker?

Yes. Wire them in series. red of second to black of first. Then red of first to radio hot, black of second to radio negative. 8 Ohm speaker out of two four ohm speakers.

If you do red to red and black to black you just made a two ohm speaker.

[Jim53066]

Hi,
I am radio illiterate, can someone give me the readers digest version of what OHM means and what is good? better? best?

The reason I ask is that I bought one of the vintage type radios and it says to use 4-8 ohm speakers only, but yet the speaker(s) that came with it do not even have what OHM they are written on them (it) (The speaker that came with it is one of those two speaker into one mount for under the factory dash opening)

I want to ad a second set of speakers to fill the cab so to speak, it does not have to be state of the art by any means.

Thanks, Jim

[slowcpe]

Cliff notes: Ohms is basically used to measure resistance. The lower the ohms, the more power you can pull from the amp. However if the amp is not stable at lower ohm rating you can create too much heat and damage the amp.

Most stereo speakers are going to be 4 or 8 ohms. Speakers like Bose use a weird ohm rating in order to sound mediocre (sorry I don't like them) and are designed to be used as an entire system. Doubt you have to worry about that.

In car stereo speakers the only time you have to be really cautious about ohms is when running subs and multiple speakers to each channel of an amplifier.

[michael bustamante]

yup what he said. when installing subs, be very sure of the OHM rating. what you have is exactly what i just made. 2 4 ohm speakers wired to run thru one channel. ( the factory deck.) if you tore it apart youd see one wire from each speaker hooked up to eachother and the other wire from each speaker leading to your harness that goes into the deck

[gmachinz]

I would say depending on what you're after for sound quality, factory Bose full range speakers shouldn't be considered bad quality-as I've installed several Bose style systems in multiple vehicles with pretty good results. I should add though too that the consensus about the factory sub's being junk and aftermarket sub's are a better choice for bottom end punch. Full range and midbass however-just push them and they'll wake up!

For example, in 2004-up CTS cars, the front center dash speaker is a full range 4" diameter speaker, both a-pillar tweeters feature built in crossovers, the front door speakers are 6.5" diameter midbass speakers. All of them have an impedance of 3.33 ohms which is odd indeed but, when you push them with a 2-ohm series wired load, they sound ridiculously nice! I tried this out after multiple Caddy forum threads talked about how nice factory speakers sound if you ditch the factory amps and drive them hard with aftermarket ones. From my experience, its absolutely true.

[panhandler62]

I have a factor Bose setup in my Infinity. I also have Bose bookshelf speakers at home. Both setups like power. They don't whisper well, but they clear up and sing with some power applied.

I do agree that the bottom end could be better. I build a dual voice coil sub for my home stereo but I'm not willing to hack into the car stereo since it's so tightly integrated with so many functions in the car.