stipud wrote:With series loading, the signal arriving at the second woofer is affected by the impedance of the first.
Actually bro, no. The "signal" is the voltage applied to the circuit (speaker voice coil). And Voltage is applied/measured directly across the positive and negative poles of the circuit, hence each coil sees exactly half (referring to 2 coils in series) of the total applied voltage.
For example. If you applied 10v ac to a pair of drivers which are wired in series. You would measure 10v ac across the total circuit (neg terminal of one driver and pos terminal of the other driver). You could also measure voltage across the individual drivers and you will see 5v ac across each one.
stipud wrote: But because bridging also adds distortion, and parallel loading ensures an absolutely identical signal sent to both speakers, running two in parallel on separate channels is the best way "on paper". Now it's probably splitting hairs... whether you can hear the difference on subwoofers is another question.
The distortion added from bridging an amplifier is very minimal and in no way will be detected by the human ear. We are talking about an increase of .5% distortion (undectable for humans) in the absolute worst case secenario and most of the time the distortion increase is much much lower than this! Furthermore, running the drivers in parallel on each channel will also increase the distortion equally as much as bridging the amp. Remember, the amp is ultimately being driven into the same load and distortion will be increase proportionally! The only difference is stereo vs mono output!
There's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with running subs in SERIES! Please take a look at nearly any manufacturer's manual for DVC subwoofers and you will see that nearly all of them will show different configurations for "series AND parallel"!
If you wanted to get REALLY tweeky. One could say that a series cofiguration is actually a more reliable circuit for the amplifier to drive! If just one of the voice coils happens to short, the amplifer will still see the load of the second good coil (hey it's better than a dead short right!?) On the other hand, when two coils are wired in parallel it takes only "one" shorted coil to short the entire circuit!
