What speakers should i get for my sailboat?

[jbsdrumboy]

Just recently purchased a sailboat. It needs a little restoration, just some in depth cleaning, little paint, and updating. It's a 25' boat I'm not really sure what brand it is yet. Started on the inside though. Does anyone know what speaker and radio system would be good for a sailboat? Would I need waterproof or not? The speakers are on the deck not in the cabin where the radio is going to be. I'm not really sure but there are only two speaker places for it anyways the speaker are just old and busted. It's also has some cb radio thing, should I update that as well? Do I need an amp? Looking forward to installing it. Any advice would help, thank you.

[rebel heart]

I'd just get a little bluetooth like the supertooth disco. Then play from your phone / tablet / laptop.

The "cb radio thing" is probably a marine vhf.

[noelex 77]

Welcome to the forum.

The most common set up is to use a car CD/mp3 player inside with waterproof speakers outside.

Try and get a car player that will play MP3's from a USB stick.

There are plenty of marine speakers that can used in the cockpit, although you can get much better sound quality for not much more cost if look in catalogs of the respected speaker companies such as Polk. They have models suitable for outdoor mounting.

As RH says on a small boat a self contained battery operated MP3 player with speakers is an easy way to add sound, or remote speakers using Bluetooth.

The best sound quality with very low price comes from using one of the T class amps. These will take a MP3 player input directly. Combine this with some good speakers and you have great sound at low cost and very low electricity consumption.

A lot depends on the ease of installation.

[Marmenorman]

I am part way through a rebuild and decided not install a radio/cd player. I am using iPod and Bluetooth with portable speakers. It works well, it's flexible and as now lex says, low consumption. You have your priorities right, fast music helps you shift the work! Good luck with you project

[PeterSailor]

Search for "sound exciter". Some youtube example on sailboat are available. No drilling or hole required.

[ozsailer]

Hello all,
at the moment on hour 38 CC we have a Fusion brand AM/FM radio that has a IPod docking station. It has four channels so that we can have music in the saloon or separately in the cockpit or both. It is a dedicated marine radio that can also be hooked up to your VHF so that the radio can be heard in speakers in the cockpit. To date I have been very impressed with its functions. In saying that with previous boats I have had just normal car radio/CD players and they have done the job just fine but we did also have marine speakers and good quality wire.
Fusion does sell in the USA and are available on Ebay. No association with the bran just happy with the product.

[jbsdrumboy]

yeah I am looking to have it sorta to the original, I'm gonna use waterproof speaker on the deck and use a keyword or Sony player in the cabin with built in Bluetooth.

[TheLostGirlsMom]

We just bought a floatable, waterproof, bluetooth speaker from a company called Ecoxgear. It's perfect for our 26' sailboat

[atoll]

ipod+big amp+ big portable speakers and generator,keep it portable,then you can have beach parties as well!

[MarkSF]

Originally Posted by jbsdrumboy

Just recently purchased a sailboat. It needs a little restoration, just some in depth cleaning, little paint, and updating. It's a 25' boat I'm not really sure what brand it is yet. Started on the inside though. Does anyone know what speaker and radio system would be good for a sailboat? Would I need waterproof or not? The speakers are on the deck not in the cabin where the radio is going to be. I'm not really sure but there are only two speaker places for it anyways the speaker are just old and busted. It's also has some cb radio thing, should I update that as well? Do I need an amp? Looking forward to installing it. Any advice would help, thank you.

As it would be crazy to spend lots of money on a stereo system, and then die because your marine VHF isn't working (but you could enjoy your sounds on the way down, a la Titanic), it would be remiss of me not to advise you to test, or replace and test, the VHF - before investing in the stereo.

[atoll]

Originally Posted by MarkSF

As it would be crazy to spend lots of money on a stereo system, and then die because your marine VHF isn't working (but you could enjoy your sounds on the way down, a la Titanic), it would be remiss of me not to advise you to test, or replace and test, the VHF - before investing in the stereo.

just get a big sound system....then you will not need a vhf as other yachts will hear you coming long before the vhf gets in range

[Boracay]

I put in a name brand car radio/CD player with a couple of sealed box speakers. It works well, has good reception and a good sound.

The disadvantages that I found with this car radio were that it needs to have a permanent connection to power to keep it's settings and it has high power consumption.

It works too well to throw away but if I were to do it again I'd go for a marine FM radio that could be totally switched off and open (unsealed) speakers.

I went to the trouble of ripping my CD collection. First I tried MP3 and then FLAC but neither sounded good to my uneducated ear. Eventually I gave up and selected my favourite CDs from my collection. They fit nicely into one shelf and sound really good.

[hellosailor]

Boracay-
Ripping CDs well is a bit of an art, no one wants to make it easy but it CAN be done.

Onceuponatime I had very good hearing. I could hear ultrasonic detectors (ouch!) and my hearig tested to above 19KHz. I could double-blind and make the high end stereo shops cry because I could always tell which equipment they were using.

And I used a certain "Tandberg killer" tape deck which could and did duplicate CD and "analogue master LPs" with no problem, so I really liked my music UNdistorted.

These days my hearing tests more like "FM quality", by 14KHz it is so much weaker that you can see the curve being to plummet. So the high-end stuff is not going to make any difference to me anymore, it still sounds GOOD but I know there's stuff I'm just no longer capable of hearing. And having objectively said that...

I banged my head for months because the music collection simply HAD to go away and go digital and I was not willing to lose any more quality. I would up using Windows Media Play to make lossless WAV file copies as masters. There are major problems with WAV files, in that the music is lossless but the DATA and TAGS often are lost and you can't edit them back in, apparently you need exotic professional broadcasting software to even touch the data tags in a wav file, and nothing else recognizes it. So these WAV files are my lossless quality archive. I could make ISO copies of the CD's to accomplish the same thing. That's a stored backup--I don't listen to it.

Then I use a free and fairly simple program called CDEX (CD Extractor) to make the copies that I actually listen to. There are a number of other programs and most of them seem way more complex or way less configurable. For instance, the same WIndows Music Player can rip to mp3--but not with the same comtrols.

CDex allows you to tweak to quality and size in many ways, many folks would be baffled by the choices. There is a choice of "stereo" or "joint stereo". The former makes a bigger file, but a more accurate one. Then the conversion can be done by the "old" algorithm or the new one. The old algorithm is more accurate at conversions, and only a tad slower. So you start by using "stereo" and "old algorithm" when you want quality.

Then there are the MP3 files themselves. The cheap stuff uses "CBR" constant bit rate conversion. The newer stuff uses "VBR" variable bit rate conversion, and not all of the old players can decode that. The argument is that sometimes, there's a lot of dead space or slow changes in music, and when that happens you can change the bit conversion rate without losing any quality. You just need smarter software to decide when and how to change the conversion bitrate. Me? I use VBR because I find all the new equipment handles it just fine, and I don't hear any difference in it.

So then I spent a couple of days with some really good headsets and some musci that really pushes highes and lows and clarity, the kind of stuff you take to test and abuse high end audio stores. I find that with my "FM" ears, I can't tell any difference between VBR-0, the top quality, and VBR-2, which is only two steps down. I had a real hard time even suspecting that I might, just might, hear some additional loss of clarity (fuzziness) if I went down to VBR-4, and that I certainly could hear some degradation at VBR-6, which is a common commercial setting.

So I said, if VBR-6 is already degraded (not that you'd notice driving down the interstate with the windows open) and if VBR-4 makes me SUSPECT I'm missing something...I'll just stick with VBR-2, which produces a nice tight file that no one has ever complained about, certainly the quality is better than cheap speakers or headsets can produce in any case!

So for me it is VBR-2, old algorithm, full stereo, and in a quiet room with good brand-name aerbuds or cans, it sounds just like CDs or master LPs to me.

If you're 19 years old and haven't been to too many loudspeaker towers yet...maybe you'll need better, if you do critical listening with no background noise. (VBG)

But yeah, it really can be that simple. Right now I've got a paltry 9500 songs on my 64GB SDXC card and I'm waiting for 128GB cards to hit the market because there's some more stuff I've missed over the years that I'm slowly chasing down.

Gave all the CDs away to some incredibly happy friends, because these days, it ain't worth the $5 and all the time required to post and sell them. I'm still not quite sure how to explain to my nephew, who is into VINYL like so many these days, "Dude, we ditched vinyl yeas ago because every time you play it, it degrades, and it sounds like **** no matter how well you try to clean it and pamper it and you really can't a/b it apart from properly made digital stuff!" But, hey, I'm happy there's still a market for full-size album art, I really miss that part of digital music. A little thumbnail of the album cover just doesn't cut it.

And if you're comparing anything on earbuds? $50 buys you a seat at the table, $100 buys you a room with a view. The $25 earbuds, with or without mic, are designed for telephony and those -6 AM-radio grade music. And fiddling around with different rubber tips on the earbuds makes a difference of day and nght.

Now, for the boat...There's some Bose 101's that I'm not in love with, but they were given to me, they're waterproof, what can you say. My old lab-reference Yamahoppers wouldn't fit in most cockpits, and they'd each take a half-berth in the cabin. Nuh-uh, compromise time. (G)

But feel free to PM on the digitizing. I put in a lot of time, and found out it CAN be done right.

[Boracay]

Thanks for the offer but I'm going to stick with my old CDs. I'd rather have a smaller collection that I enjoy listening to than a big collection that I don't enjoy.

Haven't got the time anyway. Now living aboard with an Admiral to please and a boat with never ending "repairs".

I'd rate my CD playback quality as one or two levels above FM radio. Good enough for me.

I do wish I'd kept my old Bose bookshelf speakers, even after the cat sharpened her claws on them.

[hellosailor]

Bose Bookshelf...

I've got an extra set of Bose 101, and some Radio Minimus7 (the ones that stated the whole "bookshelf really can work) craze, feel free to PM me if interested.

What I like is putting the media player on random play, and playing randomly through all those old tunes. Like Pandora without needing the radio feed or subscription fee.<G>