Ohms, or Fight the Resistance.

Have you ever wondered how loud your stereo system can go? or you guitar amp? or your car audio system?  Maybe you're hooking up some kickin' woofers and you want the most thump for you money?  But you're confused about speaker ratings, amp ratings, wattage, ohms, and everything else?  This is your answer to most of those quesitons.

First we've got to understand the signal we are trying to amplify.  These signals can come from a guitar string picked up by the "pickup", a micorphone, or even just our mp3/cd player.  Do people actually still use cd players?  Anyway.  So, we have a small vibration of sound that is evenutally turned into an electrical signals.  (transduction will be covered later).  These electric signals can be differect strengths, but we're not covering that today either.  We just want to talk about what our amplifier and speakers are doing with that signal.