What is matching?
A speaker’s impedance rating refers to the amount of electrical resistance it presents against current flowing from your amplifier or receiver’s powered outputs. Though impedance actually fluctuates as the speaker reproduces different frequencies, manufacturers usually publish a single, average figure, known as nominal impedance. Most home speakers have a nominal impedance rating of 8 ohms; likewise, most home A/V receivers are designed to be stable when pushing an 8-ohm load. Speakers with significantly lower impedance (4 ohms or less) may cause problems with these receivers by asking them to deliver more current than they are capable of producing. When you drop from an 8-ohm to a 4-ohm load, you cut the electrical resistance in half, which usually causes your receiver to increase its total power output. Some people are tempted to mate their 8-ohm receivers with 4-ohm speakers, in order to get more wattage.
Matching is a term typically used in reference to the relationship between one veneer strip or “component” and the adjacent component in a face consisting of more than one component. The individual components are spliced together employing one of a number of matching techniques. The most common is book matching, which requires reversing every other component as if you were opening the pages of a book. The result is a mirror image at the splice line. Slip matching involves splicing each veneer to the next without turning over any component. This allows the face to have the tight side of the veneer out on each component, which helps avoid the “barber pole” effect of book matching. Plank matching is a deliberate random mismatch designed to visually redistribute prominent natural characteristics in some species such as knotty pine. Random matching requires no aesthetic appeal and is used to produce back veneers which won’t be seen. The term “matching” may also be used in reference to the r
