Specing a Stereo For My Sailboat

One of the the must haves for this boat is great audio. My goal is to be able to sail around Lake Washington listening to music with friends. When I am alone, I imagine I will like to listen to podcasts and such as well.

My wake surf boat came with a Rockford-Fosgate-based systems that can either use USB or Bluetooth to connect my iPhone to the system.  It seems to work best with Bluetooth and what is cool is that I can pause the music or whatever using my Apple watch as a sort of remote control. I can pause the music, skip a track and even adjust the volume of the sound (within reason) using the crown on my watch. It’s very slick.

I also really like listening to Sirius XM, but rather than buying a XM receiver and paying for another subscription, I find that the XM app on my iPhone works great– especially since I don’t plan to leave the lake.

As I investigated adding a stereo system to my sailboat, my initial plan was to get a headunit from Fusion—mostly because the display on the Fusion marine system seemed the coolest, but I did some research first and I am really glad I did.

Marine Audio Eco-Systems

What I learned doing research is that there are basically three eco-systems for marine audio.

The first is Fusion and Garmin. What I learned was that a few years ago, Garmin bought Fusion so that basically their systems are designed to work well together.  In particular, you can connect a Fusion marine audo system to a Garmin chart plotter and use the Garmin chart plotter to control the music.

The second eco-system is Rockford-Fosgate which has a partnership with Raymarine to deliver the same kind of integration. Certain models (not all) of Rockford-Fosgate head-units can be connected to Raymarine plotters and you can display and control the music from the Raymarine plotter.

The third is Simrad which makes both chartplotter and audio equipment that can work together.

While I think most of this integration works with the CANBus interface, I really wasn’t especially interested in doing a ton of debugging, so I wanted to use parts that were known to work well together. Since the previous owner of my boat had installed RayMarine instruments and a chartplotter, I decided to go with the Rockford-Fosgate option and decided on a PMX-5CAN.  To make this work with my chartplotter, I had to also order a PMX-CAN which is basically the interface between the head-unit and the chartplotter.

Speakers

As I got into the discussion around speakers, I quickly realized that I wasn’t sure if the 25 watts per channel in the Rockford-Fosgate head-unit would be enough and the specs got confusing very quicky.

While I started my purchase process on Amazon.com, I quickly switched to Crutchfield.com since they had great knowledge and prices that were identical to Amazon.com.

My initial plan was to get Rockford-Fosgate speakers. The issue is that most of the speakers that Rockford makes have both very open grills and funky LED lights.  I really didn’t like the whole vibe (no pun intended) of LED lights on my sailboat.  I also was pretty worried about water getting on speakers through the open grills on an uncovered sailboat (even if I did put speaker covers on them when not in use).

I started a chat on Crutchfield.com and they offered to call me almost immediately.  When I started the chat, they gave me a special code to make sure that when the agent called me they had all of the context of what I was searching for. This was VERY cool and super helpful. As it happened the person who called me back was not a marine audio expert and suggested a call with a person who was. I had an appointment to go to just then. This was not a problem since they take reservations, and we made a plan for an expert to call me back a few hours later.

A guy named Hogan called me back a bit later and I talked him through the project. He recommended a set of speakers, including a sub-woofer, along with an amp to drive them. He followed up with a mail that included a link to a pre-populated shopping cart.

As I read reviews overnight, I realized that JL audio has much better rated speakers. I mailed Hogan back and he agreed.  He updated my shopping cart with JL speakers and a JL Audio Amp.

The speakers he recommended still had more open grills than I wanted.  I had seen photos of JL Audio speakers with more closed grills, and I quickly found the same model speakers but with more closed grills.

Hogan also found me some cool speakers for inside the cabin.

I simply cannot say enough good things about Crutchfield.com.

To Cut or not to Cut

As I was thinking about this order and the whole stereo thing, I started to get a bit nervous about whether or not I really wanted to cut more holes in the bulkhead of my new boat (well, I wasn’t going to do the cuts myself, but you know what I mean).

I took a field trip down to CSR Marine, the boatyard doing the work, to get their opinion.  Jeff, their specialist who does this work, said that they don’t do it a lot, but they do it enough to know its not that big a deal. He showed me a few other boats that had a pair of speaker in the cockpit.

I read some blogs that seriously cautioned against doing these cuts.  Some suggested some box-type speakers mounted to the pushpit. Others suggested installing sound “exciters” inside the lazarette in the cockpit.  Some portable Bluetooth speakers were the other ideas.

On my previous boat, a 1989 Hunter 28, I had some box-type speakers in the cabin that I would just turn up and you could hear them in the cockpit, but the sound wasn’t great.

The box speakers in the cockpit was not the look I was going for.  They seemed like more of a hack. My experience with sound exciters on PCs made me super dubious of that approach, especially for something that had to play outside.

I then recalled that when I was considering the Beneteau First 27, that the boat I looked at had some speakers in the cockpit.  Luckily, my wife had some photos and the speakers looked like a dead match for the speakers I was looking at, so I decided to go for it. If Beneteau could make it work, then CSR could too!

We will see if I regret this choice, but I doubt I will.

So what did I end up ordering?

So, in the end, I ended up ordering:

1. A Rockford-Fosgate PMX-5CAN head unit
2. A Rockford-Fosgate PMX-CAN interface to connect the head unit to my plotter
3. A pair of JL Audio JL Audio M3-650X-C-GWspeakers. These are the ones with the more closed up grills
4. A JL Audio M3-10I-C-GW-4 sub-woofer (with a grill that matches the other speakers)
5. A JL Audio M700/5 75 watt x4 amp with a channel for the sub
6. A pair of Klipsch KHO-7 speakers for in the cabin. These are more of an indoor/outdoor speaker for a home or RV, but Hogan says they will work great.