The easiest thing to do is to just be sure your cabinet is wired for 4 ohms, which it very well might already be. If it's not, it's not hard to change it. All the speakers should be wired in parallel. If you're not sure how to wire them in parallel, I'm sure there's got to be someplace on the web that explains it clearly.

There's a second option that you probably won't want to do, but it's there so I'll mention it, and that is to put a 16 ohm output on the head. There are obvious drawbacks -- you'd have to take it to a tech and pay money, the best way to do it is to drill into the chassis to put a third jack hole which you may not want to do -- but if you do it you can use it with whatever cabinet you want to in the future, so it might be worth it to you.

By the way, you can't necessarily do this with just any amp, but with the 1000S you can. All those first generation sunn amps had 3 speaker taps coming out of the transformer, only two of which (depending on the model) were brought out to the back of the chassis. A few were 16 and 8, most (like yours) were 8 and 4, but they all used the same transformer.

Ned

polymath wrote:you think that blowing the tubes would be something that happened quickly or could just occur over time?

Either, but problems with the tubes are the least of your worries.

As Roddy said (bolded for emphasis):

Rodabod wrote:You risk frying your valves and output transformer if you don't use the correct load.

This is the costly bit, both in cash and the sound of your amp post-fault -- damaging the output transformer.

well if i rewire the cab to be 4 ohms, won't i run into a similar problem since it's rated for 8 ohms? what's the diff?

polymath wrote:well if i rewire the cab to be 4 ohms, won't i run into a similar problem since it's rated for 8 ohms? what's the diff?

Did you not say it had a 4 Ohm output too?