What is impedance and why is one speaker rated at 8ohms and the others are 16ohms?
A simple definition of impedance is “the opposition of one thing to another.” For an analogy: you are in a room and you would like to leave that room, but if there were a 365-pound wrestler standing in the doorway and he didn’t want you to go through the door, he would represent a significantly high impedance. He could easily impede or prevent you from going out of the room. If, on the other hand, some person much smaller and lighter than you were standing in the doorway, he would not offer much opposition to you if you truly desired to go through that doorway. A loudspeaker’s impedance is its opposition to current flow from the power amplifier. It is the current flow from the power amplifier that actually performs the work, or causes the voice coil attached to the paper cone to move back and forth in the magnetic field, which causes the loudspeaker cone to start the air molecules bumping in to each other to produce what we hear as sound. The more current that flows in the voice coil,
