Phil, This is fine assuming you always put the device in question in series with the speaker, in other words break one line of the speaker connection and hood any 2 terminals on the unknown to the two wires you just "broke" Putting an unknown device across the 2 speaker connections of some vintage solid state amps could cause problems.
Modern audio amps do not have transformers between the active electronics and the speaker, most have capacitors but not sure all do, so shorting an output might not be a good plan. But particularly for things like switches intended for basic electrical service, not dimmers etc. this could be a simple way of finding out what you have with commonly available gear. Neat idea. Tom Fowle On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 04:39:34PM -0500, Phil Parr wrote: > This may sound kind of dumb to some but, it has always worked for me. If I > am in doubt as to what a switch or pot or such does, I try it with speaker > audio first. With eight ohms, i mean after the transformer, you can't hurt > anything or your self and then you know before using it in 1 10. > > Phil. > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] >
