Help! Bluetooth Amp Wiring in Yamaha 242 LS

[JetBoatJacket2000]

Thanks for allowing me to join this community. I am a new jet boat owner after purchasing a 2014 Yamaha 242 Limited S.
I love the boat, but I can't hear what song is playing while I take out our family. I don't need a ton of base, but I just want to be able to hear clean, crisp music where I can easily recognize what song it is...At the suggestion of Crutchfield I purchased a Soundstream Bluetooth 4 Channel Amp.

I got it all wired up to power, ground, and remote wire, but the speakers are baffling me. It actually has 6 6.5" Polk Audio speakers (bow, cabin, swim deck) and 2 tweeters (that sound awful and are all I hear when underway). I have two key questions...

1)
When I go to the head unit and look at the wires, I can easily identify the positive speaker wires from different sections of the bow by unscrewing each speaker and seeing the positive wire color. The problem is that all of the negative speaker wires are black...so I don't know which black wire in the back of the head unit goes to which positive speaker wire? Any ideas how to determine which wire is which?

2)
When I took off the speakers, the right rear cabin speaker and the right rear swim deck seem to use the same positive speaker wire. I have read in previously threads these are wired in series? I don't really know what that means, so I'd just love to know how to hook up these six 6.5" speakers and tweeters so I can get clear sound I can recognize while driving tubers and wake boarders each weekend!

 

[captainhook]

I have a different boat but I can tell you from my reading here Yamaha did a garbage job of wiring the audio on the newer models with amps. Yes, they are running more than one pair off of some of the channels from what I understand.

Regarding not being able to hear the audio while underway at the captain’s seat, I had the exact same problem as did many others. The best solution is to install speakers in the cockpit either under the throttles or up higher behind the throttles. I went with the former worrying I didn’t have enough clearance in the wall, but hands down one of the best things I’ve done to the boat. I can hear audio while underway and pulling tubes all day long much clearer. It does require me to turn it up a bit but I just cranked the gain on the amp on those channels so the others in the boat don’t get blown away.

 

[Bluewater272]

To echo CaptainHook, my boat had the same layout, with tweeters blaring in your ear. Adding the additional pair of cockpit speakers made a night and day difference, and now the tweeters sound outstanding.

 

[Ronnie]

My boat didn’t come with an amp, just a 4 channel head unit wired to power 8 speakers (the 6.6”s in the bow, cockpit and swim deck and 1” tweeters on the tower). Yamahas wiring was confusing when it came to the stereo. As I recall the bow speakers and tweeters were powered off of the front 2 channels, and the cockpit and swim deck speakers off of the 2 rear channels. I could be wrong but think, Speakers “wired in series” Share the same positive and negative leads.

my suggestion is that you install new speaker wire throughout your boat with the cockpit and bow speakers being powered by your new amp and the remaining speakers being powered by the head unit.

 

[JetBoatJacket2000]

Thanks to all for your advice and help. I plan to wire it all up this evening after pulling new wires last night!

 

[Julian]

The image below shows what a series connection looks like (see bottom left - one channel shown only). The sound bar on my 242X was wired in series. I added an amp, and in the main part of the image below you see the purple lines. This is where I cut the wires going to the sound bar, and spliced them together. Then I connected new wires from the new amp to the soundbar wires. Hopefully this makes sense.