I just ordered a pair of Boston Acoustics SX65 coax speakers for my rear deack and since head unit power tends to suck, i heard you can run the components i have in the front and use the same 2 channel SoundStream Reference 500s to power all four corners. I was looking at wiring them up like in the top portion of the diagram I found.

Doest anyone know if this will be a problem even though my amp can do 1/4 ohm's in stereo, etc.

This is the photo i'm talking about:

This should vive all my speakers more power as well.

 

As you reduce the impedance the amplifier operates in you will lose power, efficiency and other important specs relating to sound quality will suffer. Get a small amp for the rear if you want more power there.

 

Since when do you lose power when you drop the impedience on an amplifier? Running 4 sets of 4ohm components off of a high end 2 channel amplifier as pictured above will cause the 4ohm amplifier to drop its impedence to 2ohm, thus giving you much more power.... but since you have more speakers, you pretty much end up giving the same amount of watts to each of four speakers.

Now if i were to run them in series, i'd lose tons of power because the amplifiers impedience would move up to 8ohm.

My subwoofer amplifier is both bridged and in parallel to give massive power to my subs. Both of these amplifiers I own are 1ohm stable bridged or 1/2 ohm stable in stereo.

 

You will hopefully double the power when halving the impedance. Driving double the speakers should bring you back to even. In reality, the limit is the rail voltage and that will never change. The power supply can only do so much regardless of the impedance the amp is running. Since efficiency is typically near 50% but is reduced as output increases (as well as heat) the amp will become less efficient as the impedance is lowered and demand for power goes up. Other effects are decreases is channel seperation, (stereo effect) less headroom, and increased distortion levels that may become audible. So, you will never equal the power given to a stereo pair of speakers and sacrifice the sound quality of all speakers by lowering impedance. Remember, all amps are tested with a shunt resistor @ 4 ohms with a 1K tone to give their specs which aren't accurate in the real world anyway.

 

That will work, you will just lose your fade.

 

Well..... the second set of Boston Acoustics SL60's are now installed on my 2 channel Reference 500s and OMFG does the sound system sound AMAZING!!! The sound quality blows away any system i've ever owned in my 15 years of building audio systems.

The one tiny thing i'm looking into now is to find some sort of resistor which can slightly lower the volume of the rear speakers since fronts and rears are exactly equal. I prefer to have a little more volume from the fronts than the rears.

 

I think 2ohm loads are fine for subs, but would rather drive my highs and mids at 4ohms where the amp is producing its best effieciency and THD ratings. I don't doubt the sound kicks *** anyway because you have such high quality components, but might it sound even better with each speaker getting its own channel?