Plugged In: Marine Speakers and Accessories
Text by Dave MacKinnon Photos by the Manufacturers
Last month, we took a look at marine electronics including head units and amplifiers. It was a good primer to get into this cool mobile electronics category, but it’s also only half the story. I have said a million times – if you don’t have good speakers, all the expensive electronics in the world will still sound terrible. As you can guess, we are going to talk about marine speakers in this issue.
The job of any speaker is to convert an electrical signal into sound. Better speakers do this more accurately, better recreating the original sound of a recording. These guidelines hold just as true in your living room as they do pounding across the waves. But those waves pose a challenge, as does the harsh and unrelenting sun.
Marine speakers need to be designed to take punishment. They have to withstand being wet. Not damp, not splashed – flat-out wet. Something to look at when you are intending to buy a set of speakers for a marine application is to ensure that they feature a rubber mounting gasket to give a tight seal against your boat hull. Further, in a coaxial design, you need to ensure there is a secondary flexible seal at the base of the tweeter pedestal that keeps water from entering the motor structure. Without this secondary seal on the midrange cone, your speaker will likely fail within a year or so.
The ability to properly handle water means that marine speakers should have provisions to allow water that does get splashed on them to evacuate properly – this can be as simple as a small hole or channel in the bottom of the grill. Whatever it is, you don’t want water pooling behind the speaker grill.
The sun is a harsh mistress. Sure, she keeps us warm and lets us see, but she also burns our skin (when we aren’t careful) and can wreak havoc on anything else left exposed to her all day. The plastics that are used to construct marine speakers need to be chosen to be able to handle the effects of UV rays and not chalk, fade or crack. Many manufacturers, like JL Audio, Clarion and MTX offer ASTM D4329 certification, which means the device in question has been exposed to high levels of UV exposure without failing – something to look for in a marine speaker.
So, how do you buy a marine speaker? Listening to them on a display board is one way. But I suggest you step way back – about half way across the store and listen to them at many angles. You aren’t likely to be sitting in front of these speakers on your boat; in fact, in most applications; they are going to be playing music facing your legs. So, walk around the room, and listen to see if the sound changes drastically. Also, make sure you are listening to the type of music you like; I suggest bringing your own. And lastly, listen to them at the volume level you expect to use them. If you are looking for something to keep you from getting bored while fishing, then sheer volume might not be a concern, but if you are water-skiing or wakeboarding, then output and efficiency are critical.
Tower speaker systems are another beast altogether. They really need to be able to take a beating as it’s rarely the people in the boat that are trying to enjoy the music, but the person being pulled through the water behind the boat that is trying to get their groove on. For tower speaker systems, you have all sorts of options – large cone area drivers, up to and including 8-inch midrange and woofers. There are systems with horn-loaded compression drivers that are great at projecting large amounts of sound. You can also find countless accessories and options when it comes to tower speaker systems. My favourite are the LED lights – how cool would that look at dusk?
What it all boils down to is that your time on the water is your time to relax, and you should enjoy yourself. So whether you are listening to your favourite jazz music during dinner or cranking tunes while skiing – having music with you on the water just makes everything better.
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