Impedance wiring headache

It may be more a question of the sensitivity of the driver in question. You should be able to source the HF driver in a 16ohm variant and wire the 2 8ohm MF drivers in series to make a matching 16ohms. HF drivers tend to be a lot more sensitive than the MF drivers, but anyone over around 35 will likely appreciate a decent lift in the upper ranges. Which drivers do you have in mind? It's also much easier to attenuate the HF in the crossover design, so do you have a crossover in mind?


Edited by Lucasdude - 07 April 2023 at 4:32pm

Conanski wrote: The impedance of each band doesn't matter from a crossover perspective and no each band does not have to match, if using a passive crossover it just has to be designed for that impedance otherwise it won't produce the filter response you are expecting.  But this is a line array where DSP is not optional so don't even consider using a passive crossover and biamp the boxes. If you do that you can still power up to 4 boxes from a single 2-ch amp if you wire the 8's in series internally, then 4 boxes connected in parallel is a 4ohm load which any decent amp will easily drive.

Another variable to throw in is that with line arrays you will start to experience HF loss with medium to long length arrays, partially due to interference losses, partially due to air losses at the distances generally covered by such arrays, so having plenty of HF headroom is essential 

The other consideration for (line) arrays is how many boxes you want to run per amp channel.  Especially for smaller drivers, running each cabinet at 16Ohm nominal would allow you to parallel 4 cabs up, so a flown array of 8 boxes would only need two sets of amp channels.