Cabinet wiring question

[tomanyjacksons]

I have an old 4x12 cabinet with 2 Carvin gt12-16ohm 100 watt speakers and 2 Eminence Man o war 16ohm 120 watt speakers I wired it in a series/parallel to get a 16 ohm cabinet. Is running this way going to be a problem with the speakers having different wattages? Or should I just wire it parallel and go 4 ohm? Is either one better for my amp? It has jacks for both on the back. Amp is a Sovtek Mig100 all tube one channel basic loud amp. Thanks in advance for your wisdom.

[dannyr]

As long as you have it wired correcty and all your speakers are 16ohm, the difference in the wattage won't cause any problems.

[levantin]

What he said. If you're using it with a tube amp, the number of ohms won't affect your power amp wattage output either. For solid state amps, the lower the resistance, the higher the power output.

[x7stringx]

Wattage has ZERO to do with wiring a cabinet. The big thing is resistance, or ohms. As far your question about what is safer for your amp. Well, that actually depends on many factors such as your output transformer, your bias setting for your tubes, your grid plate voltage, etc... Honestly, I'd probably opt for the 16ohm operation just to be on the safe side. 8 and 16 ohms are pretty much the standard for tube amps and quite a few will run on 4 ohm. Keep in mind what Ohms are. It is a measurement of resistance. The less resistance your amp has, the more current it will draw (mA ) and the increase the chance of basically burning up your output transformer or your tubes (again, depending on what you have your tubes biased to). So, if I were you, I'd wire the cab to 16 ohm and run the amp in 16 ohm. Maybe its just my past experience but I burned up an output transformer on a B52 ST-100 running it in 4 ohm even though it was into a 4 ohm cab. Due to my inexperience with biasing and ignorance at the time with tube amps, I biased the amp to run at 42mA at 16ohm (a tad on the hot side, about 80%) not realizing that by reducing the ohms would increase the mA the amp pulled and thus burned up the output transformer.

[Hellbat]

Technically speakers are measured in impedence rather than resistance. While both are expressed in ohms impedance is more a measure of complex resistance and capacitance. I may be a little off as this is going back to my 1986 electronics training.