Yeah I have no frame of reference really, I can imagine it might be overkill 
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The main reason I can see to buy a 4 Ohm cabinet is if you want to pull all the power an amp has to offer and don’t plan to stack another on top of it. For almost all amps their power rating is at 4 Ohms and goes down by half at 8 Ohms. (Exceptions exist. You have to look at the chart on the spec sheet.)
If one isn’t stretched for cash and wants long term flexibility, the strategy of buying an 8 Ohm cabinet and a double power sized amp works out. It will only deliver half power at 8 Ohms anyway and then has full power for when you add a second cabinet taking the total load down to 4 Ohms.
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Bumping this in case some people are math shy or don’t know how to use the scientific functions of the built-in calculators in Mac OS or Windows, or their phones.
You also have to know how to operate your calculator if you do want to use one. I was getting all kinds of answers on a few different ones because I didn’t and they weren’t quite intuitive XD
If you can’t put in equations. This worked on Windows Calculator in Scientific Mode and my smol Casio FX-260 Solar II:
Enter 400 (or whatever your power is, in this case it’s 400)
Press log and get 2.602059991 etc
Press x 10 and then = you get 26.0205991 etc
Note this number
Enter 10 (or whatever your distance is in meters)
Press log
Press x 20 and then = you get 20
99+26-20 = 105
It’s easy peasy if you can put equations in.
Anyway, this is definitely very useful information to have. I was looking at speaker sensitivity last night and thought I’d see if it had come up around these parts. I was looking at getting a Hartke rig down the line, but with their most-recent HyDrive cabinets they stopped publishing the number on their site, and it’s not in the manual, either -_- considering their older cabs were in the 95-98dB range, and some of the competition is in excess of 100+… well… maybe I won’t go with them. I guess it depends on the band I get into, if I choose to do that at all.
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Higher impedance means less sensitivity to current. Higher impedance means more interference and background noise can be filtered out of the signal chain
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While this is a generally true principle, in the context of bass guitar we don’t usually see enough interference or noise in the signal from the amp to the speaker to cause a practical problem. Impedance choices in this context are usually governed by:
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Desire to get the most power available out of an amp
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Flexibility in being able to stack cabinets
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