65mm Diameter
Loudspeaker, 8 Ohm Voice Coil.


LS1 is a 65mm diameter paper coned speaker with an 8 Ohm
impedance voice coil. As the analog obsessive Bob Pease of
National Semiconductor might once have said, "What's all this
impedance stuff anyway?"
If you put a multimeter on the low Ohms scale across the
terminals of a resistor, you will measure 8 Ohms. If you put a
multimeter across the terminals of this speaker you might
measure about 8 Ohms, but it will probably be a bit less, say
7 Ohms. If you use an impedance tester working at an
alternating current (AC) frequency of 1kHz, you should measure
8 Ohms total magnitude impedance. This includes the 7 Ohms
pure resistance in the wire of the speaker coil, and maybe 1
Ohm of inductance measured at 1kHz.* The 1 Ohm of
inductance is caused by the reluctance of the coil inside the
magnet gap to pass the A.C. current - in fact you'll see
"reluctance" and "inductance" used interchangeably in old
texts.
1kHz is nothing special, it's just a standard test frequency
for audio devices, being as it is, more or less in the middle
of the low range of human hearing. Our circuit "sees"
something like 8 Ohms impedance because it's working across
the normal AM radio audio bandwidth of about 100Hz to 6kHz.
In other situations where you have a 64 Ohm speaker, or even
more so, with old style high impedance headphones, this
difference becomes ever more important. In those cases, the
reactive (inductive) impedance of the device can be much
higher than the DC resistance measured with a
multi-meter.
* It's a bit more complicated than simple addition, because
the magnitude of the resistive and inductive impedances add-up
as vectors, but a magnitude reading on an impedance tester
will say 8 Ohms.
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Recent Edit History
15-APR-2026: canoicalised, direct refs