Running four speakers off of one source wire

I have 4 outdoor speakers that are wired in parallel all on one source wire. My understanding is that this will produce a 2ohm or under speaker impedance. Is there a stereo receiver that can handle this or do I need to rewire? The current speaker wiring is not very accessible.

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Hi

Yes, if you wire the speakers in parallel then you will reduce the impedance that the amplifier sees. I think you multiply the impedance of each speaker, and then divide this by the sum of each speaker impedance, to work out the impedance that the amp will need to support.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I don't know if you'll find a stereo receiver that will support a 2 ohm impedance for long periods. Of course, any good amp may be ok at low volumes - but you are always taking a chance with an unsupported impedance.

There are a number of professional power amplifiers that might be more suited to a lower impedance, but often these are pretty powerful (and expensive) and designed to run PA speaker systems.

Personally, I would try to re-wire. Some amplifiers support two sets of speakers, or you could use a 5.1/7.1 receiver to power multiple speakers.

Also, running two 8 ohm speakers in parallel would result in a 4 ohm impedance, so you could run two pairs on each side of a stereo receiver. Obviously this receiver would need to support 4 ohms but this is much more common.

Hope that helps.

Paul (Site Editor)

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