Help Diagnosing Boat Audio Issues

[Disarmer 10+ year member]

Last season, we ended with only 4/6 speakers in the boat working. Now that it's about time to pull it back out again, I'm trying to figure out what's up with this audio system. I know this is a car audio forum, but I figured you guys would be my best bet at talking through this with me.

Setup: 4x coax 6.5's and 1 10" sub inside the boat. 4x 6.5's on the tower up top. In-boat speakers wired down to 2 ohms and run off the front 2 channels. Tower speakers wired down to 2 ohms and run off the rear 2 channels. Subwoofer run off a dedicated sub channel all on a kicker 5 channel marine amp.

Problem: At the end of last season, the tower speakers were fine, the sub was fine, and 2/4 speakers in the boat were working (both on the left side). Now that I pull it back out, 0/4 speakers inside the boat are working, the sub is working, and I believe the tower speakers are working (but they're not installed currently... not worried about them).

What I've tried: Tested all 4 channels on the amp to a stand alone speaker using a direct RCA connection to my phone. All channels on the amplifier function correctly. Checked the RCA outputs from the headunit using the aforementioned stand alone speaker on each channel, I get sound from all outputs. Plug it all up, and I just don't get any sound from the 4 speakers inside the boat.

Is it possible that all 4 of those speakers happened to die at roughly the same time? Is there some kind of wiring issue that could be easily remedied? The amplifier does NOT go into protect, so I don't think there's a short anywhere (although not completely ruled out).

The main problem is that it's extremely difficult to get to the speaker wiring/rear of the speakers, so it would be a very long process to check all of this manually (and I ran out of daylight). Thought I would post here and see if you guys can think of absolutely anything that I missed, or maybe give me suggestions on things to try.

Thank you for any help!

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[garychoffmann 10+ year member]

With a dmm check each ohm load at the speaker wire. I've ran into corroded wire and connections on a boat multiple times. High quality wire is your friend.... boat manufacturers use whats cheap.

 

[n2audio 5,000+ posts]

In my experience - boat speakers just tend to fail a lot more often than speakers in a car.

They're in a terrible environment -- and they are used at HIGH volume a lot of the time.

And to make it worse - if they are being severely stressed (clipped signal, mainly) you hardly notice because of the already loud surroundings they're trying to over-come.

I chased (what I thought was) an amp problem for months in my boat and turned out to simply be a blown speaker.

 

[Disarmer 10+ year member]

Yeah, I'm actually thinking it's corroded speaker wires. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure we just used speaker wire that we had laying around when we wired it up a couple years ago. That probably means steel wiring that's probably very corroded at the speaker connections. Gonna try the 9v battery speaker pop to the speakers tomorrow (don't have a DMM) before I start tearing the wiring out though. Thanks guys.

 

[Disarmer 10+ year member]

Turned out to be the wiring. Pulled it all and rewired and everything works now. Thanks guys