Can I use 8 ohm speakers for car audio? I have an aftermarket unit and have some 6 1/2 inch woofers and 2 tweeters from some home theater speakers I'm not using. I'm just afraid that car audio is supposed to all be 4 ohm...

 

It'll work, and it'll be real quiet or not at all. Best to use actual car audio stuff. Higher resistance means less power through it.

 

if you run two 8 ohm in parallel itll be seen as a 4 ohm speaker by whatevers feeding power to it(them) drawback being that both will get half the power they would normally recieve. ive used a few, not bad, not great, but not bad

 

^^^^ I agree. All amps rate there power at 4 ohms, so now if you hook up the 8 ohm to a 200 watt per channel amp, the max power the speaker will see is 100 watts. (thats max, not nominal) Your speakers will work, but you will end up turning the gain up to make up the difference.

 

The only bad thing with using home speakers is that they arent treated for use in weather or an automotive world. If those home speakers see water it will be alot worse to them than car woofers. In retrospect, many of the worlds greatest tweeters/ribbons ie morel scanspeak and seas lotus all have 8ohm woofers and tweeters so clearly their is some sort of an advantage to 8 ohm speakers.

 

Well I completely forgot that they were in fact 4 ohms. They've been sitting in my staorage for a year. The actual speaker cabinet was 8 ohms because it had two 4 ohm woofers, a 16 ohm mid and a 16 ohm tweeter. They are polypropalyne so they should be fine in heat and moisture, or at least better than the stock paper ones. I just figured that two 6 1/2" woofers which can handle 38hz-20khz and 100 watts each would be better than two twenty year old 3 1/2" mid woofers. They weigh the same too surprisingly so no added weight and they were free.