Hot Plate ohm question

[Florida]

I have a Marshall 1987X (50 watt Plexie reissue head) and a Mesa 2x12 cabinet. The cab is rated at 8 ohms. I can set the Marshall to 8 ohms.

My question is- I have a 16 ohm Hot Plate. I bought it for another project unrelated to this situation. Can I use this 16 ohm Hot Plate with the 8 ohm cab and 8 ohm amp setup without any damage?

Thank you for any comments or suggestions.

[Leo_Gnardo]

According to THD's owner's manual the speaker and amp AND Hot Plate ohms ratings should be the same.

Presumably you will be dialing the volume thru the Hot Plate way down so you can get lots of crunch from an overdriven amp.

Here's what I would do. Set your Marshall for 16 ohms output, plug your cab into the Hot Plate output, dial the Hot Plate way down & (probably) not much to worry about. As long as you don't dial the volume on the HP to say halfway up or more, there's a relatively large resistor in series with your speaker and your amp will "see" something close to 16 ohms & that should be OK.

All in all I'm not too much in favor of power attenuators as the usual mode of operation has you beating the heck out of your power tubes, thereby guaranteeing short life & many trips to the music store for new tubes or repair shop for problems that crop up when trying to run worn out tubes.

[billyz]

Andy Marshall told me it would be ok but the db marks would not be accurate.