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Are Cockpit Speakers Necessary?

Christian Williams

E381 - Los Angeles
Senior Moderator
Blogs Author
New gear has changed my mind about cockpit speakers--unfortunately too late to stop me from ripping big holes in the cockpit and installing permanent speakers of low quality and disappointing sound.

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Maybe if the sound were better I'd use them more. But not sailing in good air. Generally music seems right while lazing along in 8 knots, or in the slip when Manhattans are being poured. The boat is stable then, no need to have everything nailed down.

If that's the case, this bluetooth JBL portable speaker, mentioned several times recently, really does fill the bill. Waterproof. No wires. Battery life almost 10 hours. Recharges off a wall socket. No holes in the boat. Well under $100.

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And the sound is really good, no kidding. There's a speaker on top, and one under the base. They work in concert to again illustrate the advances in speaker design and miniaturization we have all noticed, and can easily apply to our boats.

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Also: there's no worse audio quality than that of a small flat-screen TV as may be found in the kitchen, or the saloon of a live-aboard sailboat. One of these solves that, too: merely plug in with a $5 two-channel stereo cable.
 

toddster

Curator of Broken Parts
Blogs Author
I thought I would be clever and install speakers in the holes that I had to cut in the liner to access deck hardware. But I couldn't figure any way to get decent speaker placement out of it.
 

JSM

Member III
Don't know what it is exactly about those portable blue tooth speakers but they seem to drive me nuts after awhile. Did a five hour delivery this past week with one lashed to the binnacle. Not loud enough for the helmsman , too loud for everyone in the cockpit. Seems to me that most of them sound best at a volume level thats usually too high for any conversation.
Maybe its just an old guy thing but I'll take my transom mounted JL Audio speakers over a portable anyday.
 

gabriel

Live free or die hard
I've found that location of the wireless speaker is important in getting good sound. This is usually an area where the sound can better dissipate from speaker like facing it toward corner or wall (bulkhead). I wouldn't use wired speakers unless the boat already had the cutouts and I didn't want to patch them.
 

Glenn McCarthy

Glenn McCarthy
I've got 3 speakers in the cockpit. 2 Stereo, 1 VHF radio from the unit mounted in the Nav Station to monitor 16.

Also in the Chicago Mackinac race, we turn it onto the finish line race committee as each boat has to report that they are 5 miles from the finish, to hear how we're doing! Lots of fun listening to that each year.
 
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