Some of you may have been following my back-and-forth with Blessed over the past few weeks, centering around his post from last summer:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2125 Well, it's been interesting. It all started when I saw Blessed's thread: he bought good stuff, took the time to do a nice clean job of it, and paid careful attention to detail. Certainly this was a winning combination that I could simply copy in my own boat. I used 4 gauge power and ground, fused at 60A, and ran a 20 gauge wire for my Sirius. Blessed had issues with his deck power memory; I don't, but my Sirius would never remember presets, so I ran a new power wire for that, and fused it with a 5A. All wires were run in plastic loom, and tied off where-ever possible with zip ties. The ends of everything were shrink-tubed. I used a fish tape instead of removing all the panels out of the side of the boat. It worked well, but required 2 people and some light swearing. I used a JL M4500 amp. It's a nice looking piece, rated for use on a boat, and it makes 80w @ 4 ohms, on 4 channels, RMS. The main difference between our 2 systems is that he used a woofer, and I didn't. (If you could see my home A/V set up, you would never believe that I just admitted that). What I neglected was that his boat is a H210, and mine is merely a H200. There is 12" difference in length (no length jokes, please) and 2" in beam. This 2" of beam came back to bite me, but more on that later.
I am very fussy about these things, and I decided to go with 6.5" speakers in the bow, instead of the 7.7"s that he used. I did this because that silly moulded in 'style swoop' that surrounds the speaker measured just slightly smaller than the 7.7" JL. So, I opted for the 6.5". I used the M650 CCX. Be careful with the nomenclature here, because the MX650 CCX appears similar, but is a lesser speaker. They have a smaller tweeter, and the grille isn't exactly the same. They also don't have a complete proper crossover. The M650 is the brother to the M770. The MX650 is a different bird altogether.
There is plenty of room for these speakers, in fact I didn't have to cut any fiberglass here at all. The stock Sony junkers only used 4 mounting holes though, so I did have to drill new holes for the 6 screws. And, because I didn't cut up here, I didn't have to replace the plywood backer like Blessed did.
Anyway, here they are in the bow:
You'll noticed I again followed Blessed's lead, and used stainless security screws to keep everything in place, and to keep it mine. Anyone who undertakes stealing my gear will either be very well equipped from a tool standpoint, or they are prepared to really screw up my boat. Either way, I'm betting they'll move on to the next one.
Next are the cockpit speakers. No worries here, right? Wrong! They fit with ease from a diameter perspective (after cutting out to match the template). They don't fit depth wise. At all. They are FAR too deep. I guess this is where the 2" difference between the H210 and H200 lies. Blessed is 100% certain that the 2 boats share that portion of liner - because he knows they have the same windshield - so the only difference can be in the liner to hull dimension. It seems odd to me that FW would increase the width of the boat, but not increase interior space? Must be something to with width vs length and the tradeoffs associated with each in how the boat handles? Whatever. So, I took my speaker mounting template (supplied in the box) to a local plastic and acrylic shop, where they laser cut me some spacer rings. This actually turned out to be a fairly elegant solution to what I was starting to consider a very serious problem. He made them from bright white, and they look quite decent. The issue I then had was that the liner isn't in the boat in a uniform manner, and this results in the liner being substantially closer to the hull on the starboard side of the boat than the port side. This still doesn't sit that well with me, but you can't tell from an appearance or performance standpoint, and I would have never known if I didn't undertake this mod, so whatever. I ended up needing a 3/8" spacer on the port side, and a whopping 1 & 1/8" on the starboard side. Because of where the vinyl trim comes down over top of the speakers, it actually doesn't look too out of place. Here are some pics.
Port:
Starboard:
Now, to round it out, here are some other pics of the amp, helm, fuse, etc.
I did take the time to set the input impedance on the amplifer with a volt meter. The JL book says to turn off all tone controls, and for a 4 ohm speaker, to adjust gain upward (while playing 1000 Hz at OdB) until your AC Voltmeter reads 17.8 volts at 3/4 volume on the head unit. First of all, I can't figure out how this power is AC, but nothing reads in the DC setting, and second, it is a VERY fine control, and setting 17.8 is pretty tough. I screwed around with it, and ended up with 17.8 for the rears (channels 3&4), and about 17.5 for the fronts. This was intentional, just to give the smaller speakers ever so slightly less power. I set the front speakers on High Pass filter, rolling off everything below 60Hz. They can't play any lower than this anyway, so sending that to them can only cause harm. I left the crossover off for the rears, running them full range, hoping that their extra size might give me some more low bass in the cockpit. It works very well. I am very impressed with the JL stuff, and it looks nice too. Other than the spacer incident, it turned out as planned.
Please learn from my mistake and don't assume that if it worked in my boat, it will work in yours. Boats are made of fiberglass, and their dimensions vary. Be careful and do your homework. It will save you some tears.
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