In reply to:
I suspect that maybe vintage receivers drove any speaker you could through at them and there may have been a few too many cut corners over the years among all manufacturers.
A lot of really good receivers in the Dolby Pro Logic days (PL Mk1 Mod 1) claimed to be stable down to one ohm, and with some of the loads we fed them, I tend to believe that. Weird combinations of isobaric (and esoteric!!
) home-brewed passive subwoofers (including one guy with two subs with two 4ohm drivers in parallel with the subs themselves hooked up in parallel - which is pretty much just a short as far as the amp is concerned!)... near and far field speaker combinations (tower far fields, bookshelf near fields in parallel)... various active and passive crossover systems. Most of the guys even wound their own coils!
A group of about 5 of us (a buddy and I were the youngest and had the least disposable income so we'd wait for the others to make the mistakes and we'd start building at their "last known good" designs) tried pretty much everything and the receivers just took it. A few thermal-outs here and there, but for the most part, they took it in stride.
(and for Chess and Sid - I was at Brian Reimer once when someone was demoing a new stereo amp and showed off that you could use it to arc weld thin metal together!)
Bren R.
