[BrendaAnnD]

Morzh, in the radios he's talking about, they didn't use 8 ohm speakers. Normal speaker impedence was around 1K-3K, think feeding a speaker directly off the plate of the output tube (basically those old horn speakers were just an earphone driver feeding into the horn). The sound was pretty atrocious by even 1930's standards, but the novelty of having a "loudspeaker" on a radio was still a selling point.