Run 6 ohm Polks at 8?

[AudioNoob57]

I have an old pair of Polk SDA-2B's which I inadvertently ran at 8 ohms on my new Yamaha Aventage RX-A1080 for a few weeks. When I found my mistake and reset the Yamaha to 6 ohms, I think I'm hearing less power. Since the Polks are rated at up to 500 wpc, and the Yamaha is 120 wpc (2 speakers), I'm wondering whether I can get away with going back to the 8-ohm setting on the Yamaha.

The "noob" in the username is no joke. Thanks.

 

[Verdinut]

I have an old pair of Polk SDA-2B's which I inadvertently ran at 8 ohms on my new Yamaha Aventage RX-A1080 for a few weeks. When I found my mistake and reset the Yamaha to 6 ohms, I think I'm hearing less power. Since the Polks are rated at up to 500 wpc, and the Yamaha is 120 wpc (2 speakers), I'm wondering whether I can get away with going back to the 8-ohm setting on the Yamaha.

The "noob" in the username is no joke. Thanks.

It's normal to have less power out of your amplifiers when the impedance switch is set to 6 ohms. What this position does is to reduce the rail voltage on the output stage of the amplifiers which results in less available power which you immediately noticed.

Our recommendation here at Audioholics is to leave the impedance switch to 8 ohms which enables you to benefit from the full power output capacity of each amplifier.

A thread referring to that impedance switch was posted and does provide more details on this topic:

https://www.audioholics.com/audio-amplifier/impedance-selector-switch-1

 

[ski2xblack]

https://www.audioholics.com/audio-amplifier/impedance-selector-switch-1