Question For Stereo Experts.

[FatBoy]

I have got some new Tower speakers and a sub for my boat and need a little advise on the hook-ups. I don't know a lot about this subject so my questions may sound dumb but any help would be great.

The Clarion XM3 has three sets of RCA plugs coming out the back, a grey set, a black set, and a red set. I know the red set is for input. The other two sets are currently going to the small Marine Audio 40 watt X 2 amp and the radio will fade my four speakers front to back and right to left. I have got a Bazooka 10 inch sub tube for the back compartment, it has a built in 150 watt amp. I have ordered an Orion 4004 amp to drive the two new Evid 6.2 tower speakers. The Orion will do 200 watts at 4 ohm X 2 which is what the tower speakers call for. I want the system to do the following when I finish.

Fade from front to rear with the tower speakers on the rear and the four cabin speakers on the front. The cabin speakers will still be running off the little Marine Audio amp.

My big question is which set of RCA leads go to the tower amp and which set will go to the cabin amp? Also how do I plug in the RCA plugs for the Sub amp, do I put a splitter on the ones that I will be useing for the tower amp and plug it in there? I say the tower amp cause I would say the fader would be leaning on that side more and I wouldn't want the sub to be faded out.

Thats all I can think of but I am sure I have missed something so any advise would be great. Maybe the best thing for me to do would be to pay a car audio place to hook it up for me but I would rather save the dime if I can.

Thanks,
FatBoy

[TwinTip]

FatBoy,

I'm certainly no expert in this matter but here are my $0.02 worth. I'm going by your description above as I don't have a manual for this stereo and don't know what the color codes mean. I'm assuming that each of the RCA cables has two male connectors, one for the Left and the other for the Right signal.

If from the main unit you have two RCA's (one black, one gray) and they are both connected to the Marine Audio Amp (MAA), I assume that one has the front L+R signal while the other has the rear L+R. If there are no tags on these cables (Front L+R and/or Rear L+R), you can test which cable carriers which signal. To test this, turn the unit on and make sure you have audio on all of the speakers (you can leave the fade in the center of front/rear), remove the input RCA (either the black or gray cable) at the MMA and pay attention to which speakers don't provide audio. Once you identify which of the two RCA cables has the front signal (L+R), you can connect this pair of RCA's to the input of the Orion Amp.

You will be left with only one signal into the MMA (based on your description, this would be the front then). You will have two options here. The first would be to connect the speakers going to the cabin (on the front side of the fade) to the only MMA output that has an input signal. This will result in connecting the speakers (L front/rear and R front/rear) in parallel and thus decreasing the impedance (as seen at the output of the amp) by half.

The other option would be to buy two Y's (you can get these at Radio Shack) and connect one of the radio front RCA outputs (left for example) to one of the primary leads on the Y (make sure you buy the right male/female configuration, I believe you should have a female on one end which goes connected to one of the RCA's from the main unit and two males on the other ends, these would go into the inputs (front L and rear L) of the MMA. Do the same for the connection of the right channel. This other option will provide you the same impedance as seen at the output of the amp while also giving you the same output power as your current configuration.

You also have to think about the remote cable for the Orion amp (the blue lead) which needs to be connected to the radio. You might be able to use the same one on the MMA and just take a new lead off of that connector (if this is a screw type). Have you identified your power source for the new amp?

If you have a bazooka, does this radio have a sub-output or are you installing a cross-over? How are you feeding the signal into this other unit?

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. If you can include pictures of your existing configuration (radio, amp and wiring), it would be great. Look at the input connectors on the amp, they probably have labels to identify which lead has a certain input/output.

As I said in the beginning, I'm no expert on this matter but I hope this helps.

[TwinTip]

There is another option that you may want to consider. I believe the stereo you have has an output of 50 watts. You can connect one pair of speakers on the cabin straight to the powered output leads (green or gray, I think) and the other to the MMA. If you want to be able to control the cabin separately from the tower by using the fader, you will have to make sure that the speakers you connect to the stereo amp are on the front side (cabin) leads.

Using this configuration will allow you to take the line output from the rear to your new amp and the line output from the front to the MMA (only one of the inputs though). The other speakers (or second pair) on the cabin would then be connected to the front powered output of the stereo.

I don't think you should have a problem if you decide to go for option 2 listed above, specially since you are splitting the line output and should not have a great amount of loss. It will be picked up by the amp anyway.