Nowadays, whenever you’re buying a new car or upgrading your vehicle’s sound equipment, it’s common to hear salespeople highlight 2-ohm 6×9 speakers as a selling point.
2-ohm speakers come with less electrical resistance, the spiel goes, and will therefore allow you to listen to music, podcasts, and other types of entertainment at a much higher volume.
Is this claim true? Yes, but it’s marked with a giant unaddressed asterisk: loudness is only half the picture.
Should You Pick 2-Ohm 6×9 Speakers?
If blasting your favorite tunes as loud as mechanically possible is your chief concern, then yes, 2-ohm speakers are the way to go.
If, on the other hand, you care about quality even a little bit, then you may want to consider a different option.
Understanding Ohms
An “ohm” is not a type of speaker but a unit of measurement. What is it measuring, you ask? Electrical resistance, or, to borrow from electrical engineering lingo, “impedance.”
In super-duper-ultra-mega-oversimplified terms, the impedance principle boils down to this one key fact: the lower a speaker’s ohm rating, the more efficiently the audio signals it receives can pass through it.
Superior audio channeling might sound like a good thing, and it is—as far as volume goes. As mentioned, though, there’s a flipside to the ohm dynamic, which is this: the lower a speaker’s ohm rating, the poorer its overall quality.
Lower-ohm speakers, then, offer more volume, while higher-ohm speakers offer a better listening experience.
There’s a fairly straightforward explanation for this effect. The less impedance a speaker has, the more easily it accepts input signals and the less work the amplifier has to do. However, one consequence of increased speaker power is a reduction in t