Cascade Crew

IROCDave · Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2012 9:32 pm Post subject: electrical gremlins

I have finaly found time and decent weather to explore the new to me boat and found that the sound system has a problem. The right side mid range speakers have a erratic distortion intermittenly. I pulled most of the interior tonight and found that it has a 600 watt amp powering 4 each 10" sub woofers and two 300 watt amps powering the other 10 speakers.

The sound system is way beyond anything I have seen before and I have no idea what I am looking at.

Any ideas where to start? Grounds?

Dewey316 · Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2012 9:36 pm Post subject:

I would start by checking and making sure all the connections at the amp and speakers are good. I had a front speaker doing the erratic distortion/static, and found that one of my RCA cables was a little loose and just needed to seat better.

Al Hasse · Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2012 9:45 pm Post subject:

Like John said, make sure your connections are good. Grounds are tough to isolate sometimes, and on a boat it makes it worse since there's no metal chassis to use for ground. Maybe on another nice weekend I can come up and have a look - never seen a marine sound system before, but the basics should be the same...

aaron_sK · Posted: Sun Apr 08, 2012 7:57 am Post subject:

jchaussee · Member Joined: 14 Nov 2010 Posts: 1318 Location: renton

Beings you have interior out, it may be a good time just to rewire. I like to use 14 gauge on all my smaller speakers and 10 on my subs. I don't know about grounds on a boat but I am sure there has to be grounds for the rest of the electrical so just ground it to that.

BluFbdy · Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2012 9:48 am Post subject:

Basics are all the same, ground normally comes from the negative battery cable, or the amp since its a boat. Take a dvom and check each speaker for ohms, disconnect it from the amp first each speaker should be 4 ohms, maybe 2, to rule out the amp take a known good test speaker and touch it to each channel on the amp and listen for distortion, if the front left speaker is makin the weird noise and you switch it with the front right and the noise doesn't play thru the new speaker its the speaker itself, if its still present then either the rcas need to be checked or the channel is tweaking out

That's a crazy amount of speakers even for a boat though... I've done 6 and 2 subs before but that's the most I've ever done

BluFbdy · Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2012 9:49 am Post subject:

Basics are all the same, ground normally comes from the negative battery cable, or the amp since its a boat. Take a dvom and check each speaker for ohms, disconnect it from the amp first each speaker should be 4 ohms, maybe 2, to rule out the amp take a known good test speaker and touch it to each channel on the amp and listen for distortion, if the front left speaker is makin the weird noise and you sketch it with the front right and the noise doesn't play thru the new speaker its the speaker itself, if its still present then either the rcas need to be checked or the channel is tweaking out

That's a crazy amount of speakers even for a boat though... I've done 6 and 2 subs before but that's the most I've ever done

IROCDave · Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 7:15 pm Post subject:

Al, I might take you up on the offer in the next couple of weeks. Access to the amps requires pulling alot of the interior on the back side of the dash. From what I can see it was proffessionaly installed. The idstortion is coming from all of the speakers mounted in the side panels on the right side. I cant track the wiring until all of the right side interior and mid cabin interior has been removed.

Can you PM your cell number?