Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

The JL coaxes will not be out till 3Q 06 according to JL Audio. This may influence your speaker decision if you want them soon. I am going to add 4 more speakers (8 total) & thought i would get rid of my 4 current Kicker KM60s & go w/ all JLs, but now i will just buy 4 more Kickers & see how the JLs are received.

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

In my house the speakers I have are rated at 100 watts, I run alittle over 800 to each of them, in 4 year I have not blown a single speaker. I have put the same speakers in someone's house with a 50 watt amp and they blow them a few times in a year and I have to warranty them, finally I got sick of them blowing them and I kept telling them they needed more power so they would quit blowing them I put a 400 watt amp on them they were louder and never blew them again. that was a little over a year ago.

fourteen years ago I did a demonstration where I took a tweeter that was rated at 50 watts and told some of the people that came in the stereo shop that there was not an amp out there in the car market that had enough power to blow the tweeter, I had an o-scope set up so that we would not let the amps clip, and I built a good crossover network that would keep the signal within the range the tweeter was meant to play in, if some one would have shown up with a little amp it probably would have blown but of course everyone shows up with the biggest amp they could find and it handled all of them untill someone showed up with an earthquake 300 by 4 (looked like a surfboard), and we ran two of the channels mono into it and it played for several minuites but then finally melted the coil. so yes enough power will eventually use the coil as a fuse, but the moral of the story is that it did handle most of the big amps out there.

A speaker will handle alot more power as long as it is not distorted then it will handle when it is distorted. that is why I made the comment that I made

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

alot of people blow there factory car stereo speakers and they never got loud and sounded bad but you can take that same 8 watt factory car speaker and put 300 watts to it and it will be a whole lot louder and sound better and you will probably never blow it. I had a rockford fosgate power 300, with the front two channels mono to one factory 4x6 and the back two channels mono to the other factory 4x6 out of the dash of a 91 surburban, with them mounted in the kick panels of my camaro and took it to a few stereo competitions and won just to prove my point.

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

BYC... I never understood why my front dash (stock) speakers blew.... maybe it was because everything else was on amps and they were just attached to the head unit.... thanks for the lesson.

Ernie

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

In short, amplifier clipping. Providing less power to a speaker than what it's rated for will not itself hurt the speaker, however it's when the user runs out of amplifer power, which will happen a lot sooner with a smaller amp. When an amp clips, it chops off the waveform and for a brief moment the speaker sees DC voltage. The speaker has stopped moving but energy is still flowing through the voice coil. A big subwoofer's baffle or diaphragm is also a fan that cools the voice coil. No movement, no cooling. Also little speakers like tweeters can be physically damaged. So the best thing is to get an amp that's at least as powerful as the speaker demands, if not a little more. It's just like matching Props up to engine power. There needs to be a balance if one is to "throttle" a sound system.

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

OK, so lets go back and I'll ask one question at a time.

Question:
Can I run the 4 Babb speakers that I have for the cabin with no amp and use an amp for the 4 cockpit speakers?

I ask this because I just want a basic stereo system with no need for being loud in the cabin. I just want to have a head unit, one amp and 8 speakers total. Can it be done this way???

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

Yes you can. Just don't let distortion come out of those cabin speakers. The only thing you'll have to work on is the gain structure of the amp for the cockpit speakers. That means adjusting the level of the cockpit amp in relation with the cabin. First take the cabine speakers up loud (without distortion) to the point where you think that's about loud enough for you or that's all the amp can dish out. Now turn up the cockpit amp until you max out the speakers there. Now note the level on your headunit and that's your max volume for the entire system.

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

Yes you can, however do you want to be able to fade front to back, or cockpit only/cabin only music. If you want to have cabin and no cockpit you just put a simple switch in the dash to put that in line with the amp trigger.

Jon

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

OK, Thanks Jon and Unsane for answering that question!!

Next question:
Would it be a better option for me to still use eight speakers, but to run two speakers to each channel of the 4 channel amp?
What I mean by that is wire each pair of speakers (cabin front, cabin rear, cockpit front, cockpit rear) in parrallel. From what I understand, if I use speakers with a 4 ohm impedance rating, that would knock them down to 2. Using this method would give me fade control, wouldn't it?

Keep in mind that I'm not trying to build some kind of superduper system here, just a nice radio. I really don't have the room for multiple amps.

Re: Boat Stereo System 101
 

Jon beat me on this one, but I have to say the same thing. I double checked some amps and no 4 channel that I could find has 4 RCA inputs or even 4 high level inputs, plus there probably aren't very many headunits have 4 RCA outs either. Yes, go with the original plan and put the amp on a switch, so if you want to play some tunes overnight, you can kill the amp and save your batteries. Now about that Disco Ball :evilb: