[Elecraft] KX2 speaker/headphone question

[Jim Brown]

That's the good engineering practice to protect the output stage from 
shorts. In that situation, 8 ohms will get more power than 4 ohms. It's 
the classic "maximum power transfer theorem," where, when the LOAD is 
variable, you get max power when the load Z is equal to the source Z. So 
it comes down to which speaker is more efficient.

73, Jim K9YC

On Tue,2/7/2017 6:52 PM, Ron D'Eau Claire wrote:
> To answer your question, there are 10 ohm resistors in the phones line - one in each channel. So you are losing more than half the audio power in the resistors. (On the plus side, you'll still have an audio output working even if you accidentally short the audio to ground!)