I was wondering what kind of speakers would work in an amp (other then actual amp speakers), more specifically, could I use car speakers (large ones, obviously) in an amplifier without blowing the speaker out? Similarly, could I use a sub-woofer from a car stereo and use it in a bass amp? Thanks in advance.
Steve-0
You could use these speakers. Whether they sound good or not is hard to say. I think the bass speaker would probably work well, but car stereo speakers probably wouldn't sound too great for guitar.
What determines whether you blow a speaker or not is it's power rating. Usually, you want speakers rated higher than your amplifier. So if you had a 40 Watt amp, you would probably want to run it into a speaker rated at least 60 or 75 watts. The higher the rating of a speaker, the better the construction and materials used.
BUT...... You could run a 1000 Watt amplifier into a 20 Watt speaker. It will work fine if you don't crank the amp up. Do you understand that? But crank that amp and you will certainly blow that speaker in seconds.
You can blow a speaker rated 120 Watts with a 5 Watt amplifier. Huh????
It's true. What happens is that when you overcrank an amp it starts to "clip" and send squared signals to the speakers. The speaker doesn't know the difference. It will try to imitate these squared signals and fry the speaker.
There is a difference between Audio/PA speakers and guitar speakers. Guitar speakers are designed to handle and even produce a certain amount of distortion. So you don't have to worry about a "clipped" signal as much with a guitar speaker as an audio or PA speaker. So if you use a car stereo speaker for guitar and crank the amp, it might fry those speakers when a guitar speaker would be fine.
You must also understand impedence. All impedence is is resistance to current flow. The higher the number, the higher the resistance. So a 4 Ohm speaker presents less resistance to the amplifier than a 16 Ohm speaker. Also, there are two ways to hook up multiple speakers, Series and Parallel. They are totally different. Two 8 Ohm speakers in Series presents a 16 Ohm load to an amp, while two 8 Ohm speakers in parallel present a 4 Ohm load to an amp.
Amps are designed to function best at a certain impedence, usually 8, 4, or sometimes even 2 Ohms. You will almost always see this information on the back of your amp. Sometimes you will see something like this;
100 Watts @ 4 Ohms, 80 Watts @ 8 Ohms.
So, if you hooked up a 4 Ohm speaker to this amp it would get 100 Watts of power. If you hooked up a 8 Ohm speaker it would only receive 80 Watts.
When you use more than one speaker, they share the power. If you hooked up two 8 Ohms speakers in parallel (for a 4 Ohm load) to this same amplifier (100W @ 4 Ohms), then the two speakers would share the 100 Watts and receive 50 Watts each.
When you see an Ohm rating on the back of an amp, you do not want to go below this figure. So if you hooked two 4 Ohm speakers in parallel (for a 2 Ohm load) to this same amp (100W @ 4 Ohms) there is not enough resistance to current flow. Too much current is running through the amp and it was not designed to handle this much. You can fry your amp.
When you put too high a resistance on an amp, it will not usually harm the amp, but the amp will not be able to put out full power. If you hooked two 8 Ohm speakers in Series (for a 16 Ohm load) to this same amp (100W @ 4 Ohms) the amp will probably only send about 50 Watts to the two speakers which they will share equally (25W each). It is kinda like driving with your foot on the brake pedal.
I am just telling you all this so you will have an idea if these speakers can be safely used with your amplifier.
What kind of amps do you have? How many watts at what ohm load are they rated? What is the power rating of your speakers? What is their ohm rating? Write back and we'll see if they will work.
If you know something better than Rock and Roll, I'd like to hear it - Jerry Lee Lewis
yes you could do that but if you want a really good guitar sound i suggest that you just upgrade your speakers to guitar speakers but if you want it to sound different than you could use car or stereo speakers but they will have to be the correct size and the right impededence they will also have to be realitivly close wattage as what you had in there before so the speaker isn't over or under powered so i suggest you get a profesional (unless you really know what your doing)
