askieffer wrote:
I don't want it to be that loud annoying boat on the lake blaring their choice of music. I just want to be able to hear it in the boat while under way, it needs to drown out the captains choice that is still loud even when off. We pull up in a cove and float a lot. I want to be able to turn the transom speakers and tower speakers on louder than the four speakers in the boat so we can hear it floating and not blow those in the boat out. I'm not going to play it while wake boarding, I'm in my 40's and that nonsense takes every bit of my concentration so I don't injure myself.
I just want selectable choices with a nice deep sound.
Thanks for the help.
What you are looking to do is completely possible, and may be as simple as reconfiguring some RCA cables between the head-unit and amps. If your head-unit has front and rear RCA outputs and the ability to fade between them, then you can run the front RCA cables to the amp driving the in-boat speakers. Then run the rear outputs to the amp driving your transom speakers. This allows the in-boat occupants to fade down the interior speakers, while leaving the transom speakers playing at the head-unit volume level. From there, we can a little more involved with the use of an actual volume zone controller. A zone controller would allow for true volume control of each "zone". This can be done with inexpensive line level POTs, a zone controller line driver, or an EQ.
Speaker placement, the number of speakers, the power driving them and how they are tuned will all factor into how well they can be heard over wind, water and engine noise. Having a sub will also help to enrich the sound and balance it out by filling those missing notes that a typical 6.5" in-boat will not want to reproduce. For tower speakers, there is no substitute for surface area. More speakers will make it louder, but does nothing to expand the mid-bass. You need larger speakers to accomplish this.