Originally Posted by horseshead
Sorry Rick, but he's right. While we did maintain pretty tight tolerances, our 16 ohm speakers were really about 8 ohms and our 32 ohm speakers were closer to 16 ohm. Why? To make them a little louder. Remember, these were tube amps we were feeding. If you have a big hunk of iron for a transformer, tube amps are a little less fussy about lower impedance loads. Later, JBL just added "8 - 16 Ohms" on the label.
We never said, "whatever". That expression didn't appear until many years later.