Starting my sound system update journey. Please bear with all the questions that will follow

[tabbibus]

So everything is connected now!

Holes were made. I will say, I cut in reverse the whole time. When in fwd, it would jam and skip. I scratched a surface the first time. Oh well.



For the bow port side speaker I removed the head panel and fished the cable in this little channel.



New speakers are in and they are pretty.





I need to spend some time now with cable management

 

[tabbibus]

Well shoot. Positives, system sounds amazing. Both the JLs and the Polks.
Negatives?
- Speaker hum. Ugh. How should I trouble shoot this?
- I seem to have messed something up in the wiring, although I thought I was careful. Now the boat will only power if I turn both batteries on AND the emergency bridge switch as well. No other combination will give me power. Thoughts?

 

[JBehrens]

Well shoot. Positives, system sounds amazing. Both the JLs and the Polks.
Negatives?
- Speaker hum. Ugh. How should I trouble shoot this?
- I seem to have messed something up in the wiring, although I thought I was careful. Now the boat will only power if I turn both batteries on AND the emergency bridge switch as well. No other combination will give me power. Thoughts?

The hum would be crosstalk with the grounding of the head unit. I had a similar issue, if the head unit is being powered by the factory fuse board it will have a lot of interference from other equipment. Your best bet is to home run a new ground from the head unit to the ground on the amplifier. Or the gain is too high on the amp.

How did you ground the amp to the battery? You shouldn't need to use the bridge switch to get it running.

 

[TimW451]

…
- I seem to have messed something up in the wiring, although I thought I was careful. Now the boat will only power if I turn both batteries on AND the emergency bridge switch as well. No other combination will give me power. Thoughts?

Did you change or remove anything while doing the work. Maybe take a wide shot of switches and battery to see what is going on. My guess is that all the positive or negative connections are only on one battery/side of the switches.

 

[fatboyroy]

Well shoot. Positives, system sounds amazing. Both the JLs and the Polks.
Negatives?
- Speaker hum. Ugh. How should I trouble shoot this?
- I seem to have messed something up in the wiring, although I thought I was careful. Now the boat will only power if I turn both batteries on AND the emergency bridge switch as well. No other combination will give me power. Thoughts?

You have positive connected to one battery and negative ot the other, only works when you enable parallel connection through bridge. Connect both to accessories battery dont connect to start up battery.

 

[tabbibus]

Plan for next time
1. Set gain on amp, install ground loop isolator.
2. Review wiring at battery and take pics for y'all
3. Consider opening up switch

 

[tabbibus]

Okay lads. I found the electrical gremlin. Turns out I'm an idiot. When I reconnected the wires I left a ground wire hanging. Great success.

Speaker hum is now minimal and actually I think I can barely hear it. I will likely just leave it as is.

Lastly I added a on-off switch for dvsr ground wire, for the smart charger to work correctly. Previously I will simply taking the wire off after every outing. This will make it just a bit faster.

 

[JBehrens]

Okay lads. I found the electrical gremlin. Turns out I'm an idiot. When I reconnected the wires I left a ground wire hanging. Great success.

Speaker hum is now minimal and actually I think I can barely hear it. I will likely just leave it as is.

Lastly I added a on-off switch for dvsr ground wire, for the smart charger to work correctly. Previously I will simply taking the wire off after every outing. This will make it just a bit faster.

View attachment 182174

Turn the volume up on the system with no music playing and start turning things on like the nav lights, bilge, blower, etc to see if you get a hum. That would help determine if there is cross talk.

 

[tabbibus]

Took her out today. Zero hum. And my god! What a difference in sound quality while underway. I don't know how to explain it but it just sounds better. Makes for some truly epic cruising.