BradcTA

I have the stock Bose cd player in my Camaro. One of the woofers in the sail panel was blown so I figured what the heck, so I went ahead and decided to try some cheap Lightning Audio speakers from wal-mart rated at 4 ohm's just to see if it would sound OK. I checked the resistance with the multimeter when the orignal Bose speaker was install and it read 1 ohm. After installing the wal-mart 4 ohm speakers I checked it again and to my amazment It read 1 ohm!. I couldn't believe it! The speaker hit hards and sounds great. Can anyone axplain this? Am I fooling myself??? I've always heard on this forum that you cannot use a regular 4 ohm speaker on a standard Bose system but I guess you can... I only thing I can think of is that the amp has some type of internal circuitry to lower or raise the impedence but I don't know.

LS1 RULZ

You can't measure impedance with an ohm meter. Resistance and impedance are two entirely different things. On top of that you cannot accurately measure a speaker's impedance while it is connected to the stereo system. It must be disconnected from the stereo and you cannot be touching the leads while you are taking your measurments.

Critter

i think your gonna overheat your heat unit and blow it, you drop ohms like that and stuff starts heating up. have fun while it lasts

BradcTA

So basically it's going to blow my HU? why would the meter read the same no matter what speaker I had connected? If I was in fact only getting 1/4 of the power to the speaker would it nort sound horrible? It sounds as loud as the other Bose speaker on the other side.

LS1 RULZ

Like I already said you can't measure a speaker's impedance while it is connected to the stereo. The speaker is conneceted in parallel with the stereo system which gives you an incorrect reading. That's why you have to measure the speaker by itself.

BradcTA

Fine, I know the speaker is 4 ohm. My question is that putting a 4 ohm load on a bose amp that expects a 1 ohm load going to hurt anything and why does is sound so good with just 1/4 of the power? Is the amp really seing a 4 ohm load from the speaker or can the amp bring the impendence down to 1 ohm? Can a run regular 4 ohm speakers and it be OK?

LS1 RULZ

Running 4 ohm speakers in place of 1 ohm speakers is perfectly OK. It's when you have 1 ohm speakers in place of 4 ohm speakers that you run into problems. The lower the ohms the more current flow you have. If the speaker draws more current than the amp can deliver, the amp will most likely go into protection mode and shut down. If not, you may fry the amp's output.

The speaker IS the load. There is nothing the amp can do to change that.

BradcTA

Also, there are no amp hooked up directly to the front and rear speakers on my car, only on the speaker in the very back. Maybe this is why it's getting 1 ohm of resistance. Now that I know it will work I want to get a set of JL audio 6w0 subs to put in there..

BradcTA

Will using 4 ohm speaker cut the actual power 1/4?

BradcTA

OK, I tested the speaker on the door, sail panel (used as a sub only), and the back full range speaker. It sounds like crap hooked up to the door but on the other two locations it sounds fine. Why would it sound different?

LS1 RULZ

Because you are mixing and matching the BOSE system with after-market equipment. Amar Bose doesn't like people messing with his designs so thay make it harder than usual to swap out parts for after-market replacements.