newbie: 2 cabinets = more volume?

[Harvey Gerst]

Well, yeah, if you wanna get all technical about it!!!

 

[ausrock]

Damn, and I thought "mutual coupling" was some sexual thang .

 

[joshuag]

Just found this forum today. This was a topic I was somewhat familiar with though mainly learning through car audio, which shouldn't be much different in this situation. Anyway, for starters an 8 ohm speaker that handles 100 watts can only handle 100 watts (you could probably get by with a little more but I'm trying to keep it simple). If you hook two of the same speakers together they can still only handle 100 watts. However depending on how you wire these speakers (series or paralell) you will either double or half the ohm load that the amp recognizes. To keep things simple mathematically the amp puts out 50 watts at 8 ohms. By hooking the two speakers to it wired in series the ohm load is doubled to 16 ohms and the amp puts out only 25 watts. When the speakers are wired in paralell the ohm load drops and the amp will put out 100 watts. This is just a simple scenario with everything being perfect however it doesn't always work out perfect like this. When cutting the ohm load in half the amp in most cases will not double power exactly. It also will result in the amp running hotter which, if it is not designed to run at the specific ohm load, can result in damaging the amp. So you can increase or decrease the power put out by the amp by changing the ohm load. Now as far as maintaining the same amount of power between one speaker cabinet or two, which I beleive was the original question, as long as the ohm load is not changed by adding another cabinet each cabinet will receive the same amount of power as was received by just the one cabinet however will have more speakers pushing more air so it would result in it being louder. I hope this was a little helpful in answering the question and not so overly technical that it just confused you.