I have a new mojotone speaker I am going to try in my rig. Is it normal when rated at 16 ohms for it to test 11 to 14 ohms or in between every second? It changes constantly while cone is at idle with no audio source testing only the speaker. When I test the impedance of my other model celestions it reads/settles at a constant level. Is this maybe a vintage speaker design thing?
Yes, that’s normal. Resistance and impedance are not the same, but the resistance will be close to what the speaker impedance is. Hope that helps.
- it is common and expected for the dc resistance of a loudspeaker to read less than the rated impedance.
- the reason your multimeter seems to fluctuate is because the speaker’s impedance has a significant reactive component, and some not-so-great multimeters may not be able to “settle” in this case.