Impedance matching tube amp and speakers

I have a late 80's Fender Super 210. Its a 2x10 speaker config.

What I have done is stripped it from its enclosure and installed one of the 10" speakers into a homemade ISO box.

I only have this one speaker connected. Its 16ohms, the amp says on the back it needs 8ohms.

I have found that with the single speaker connected, the amp breaks up much sooner than with the original 2x10 config. I have been living with this arrangement for the last year.

Is there a way I can use the single 10" speaker, but make it have the same sound as when 2x10 speakers are connected.

Does this make sense? Sorry for the complete noobness of this question

when you double the ohms on the sec side, you double the ohms on the pri side,

so if you have an output transformer with an 8K P to P load rating,

it turns into 16K because of the 16 ohm speaker.

so the match between the tubes and speaker is different.

the only way to fix this is to take out 2 tubes of a 4 tube push pull circuit,

or re wire the output transformer.

a power resistor of 16 ohms wired in parallel with the speaker might work,

waste of power but you might get a better sound,

i thought 16 ohm speakers went out when the transistor came out and needed 4 ohms,

the good news is that your copper efficiency goes  from 94.3% to 95.7%, 

this is due to the speaker system drawing 1/2 the normal current.

loss will only be 0.5 db as m, your mis-match factor, is 16/8=2,

therefore mis-match loss,  ML(db)= 20 Log 1+m/2*m^.5 = 0.5 db,

low end will drop just a bit and phase shift will go up about 10 degrees below 20 hz.

Or buy an 8 ohm 10" speaker rated for the full output power of the amp.

CJ, thanks for your reply. Very informative.

mjrippe said:

Or buy an 8 ohm 10" speaker rated for the full output power of the amp.

Click to expand...

This is actually a more simple solution and I think I might go with this after all  :

I think I didnt go this route originally because I was tight on cash at the time, but this makes sense.