00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 Hi, I'm Randy Vance, and thanks for joining me today on my dock.
00:14 Now, what I'm going to be doing is a stereo upgrade.
00:17 Now, the system I had in my boat is going on four years old.
00:21 While it still is all perfectly functional,
00:23 the speakers have been out on the weather all that time
00:26 and are starting to show some of the effects of that.
00:29 I also want to upgrade it, increasing the amp power
00:32 and getting a better boom out of my subwoofer.
00:35 So what we did was we went to the folks at Kicker
00:37 and asked them what they thought we should do.
00:40 Well, the first thing they suggested, since I wanted more subwoofer power,
00:43 is more powerful amplifier.
00:46 They suggested the KMX-A900.5.
00:50 Now, the beauty of this amplifier is it's basically three amplifiers in one.
00:54 You've got a zone one amplifier, a zone two amplifier, and a zone three,
00:59 or the subwoofer amplifier.
01:02 That's perfect for this setup.
01:04 I'll use zone one on the lower speakers.
01:06 I'll use the subwoofer or zone three for the sub,
01:09 and I'll use zone two for the upper speakers.
01:12 Now, since space was limited in the hard top,
01:15 we went with the KM65 6.5 inch speakers.
01:18 These are LED lighted.
01:21 Each speaker comes with both a gun metal and a white grill,
01:24 and we'll be using the white grills.
01:26 They perfectly fit the holes from the old speakers,
01:29 so there's no adjustments there necessary,
01:31 except to add the terminals to connect the speakers.
01:34 Now, the next element in our refit are the KMXL 8 inch speakers.
01:39 These are 4 ohm speakers, but there's a special feature.
01:43 They're called horn loaded speakers, and that's
01:45 because there's an equitangential horn in every speaker.
01:49 You don't just have a tweeter dome.
01:51 You have a tweeter powered horn that gives you
01:54 a full range of rich tones, and it's
01:57 surrounded by a woofer to give you those deep bass tones.
02:00 Now, these 8 inch speakers are far more robust
02:03 than the old ones, and they required a little bit bigger
02:05 hole, but we could use the KSLR LED rings,
02:09 and that sets those speakers out a half an inch.
02:12 That makes the cage around those speakers
02:15 fit the hole without any additional cutting.
02:17 Now, these speakers also use Deutsch connectors,
02:20 and they have a built in LED RGB controller.
02:24 All we had to do was connect that harness
02:26 to the old speaker wires, and we were ready to go.
02:29 Now, the last speaker element on this project
02:31 is Kicker's KMF 10 4 ohm subwoofer.
02:35 This is a very robust subwoofer, has a larger cage,
02:38 and we did have to widen the hole on this install here.
02:43 It's LED lighted and comes with white, which we're using,
02:46 and a gun metal grill, which we're not.
02:49 Finally, we got to the amp.
02:50 The existing controller, a radio if you will,
02:53 had all the outputs labeled so we could easily
02:55 move the RCA output cables to the appropriate inputs
02:59 on the new amp.
03:00 Before we connected the speakers,
03:02 we made gain adjustments to the amp.
03:04 Here's how.
03:05 On the controller, we adjusted all the tone and balance
03:08 settings to neutral.
03:10 We raised the volume on each zone to 75%.
03:14 Earlier, we downloaded test tones from Kicker's website
03:16 to a USB drive and plugged them into the controller.
03:19 For zones one and two, our upper and lower speaker sets,
03:23 we dialed down the gain on each zone to zero
03:25 and set the crossover filters to off.
03:28 Then we played the high frequency tone for zone one
03:31 and two, and we individually adjusted the gain dials
03:34 hidden on the front of the amp until they lit up.
03:37 Then we backed them down just until they went off.
03:41 That properly sets the controller output
03:43 to the speakers.
03:44 To adjust the sub, we dialed down the gain to zero
03:47 and set the high and low frequency crossovers
03:50 to their highest settings.
03:51 We played the low 50 kilohertz frequency tone for the sub
03:55 and gradually turned up the gain until the adjuster knob lighted.
03:58 Then we backed it off again until the light went out.
04:02 It's now time to connect the speakers.
04:05 The E-box above provided tight quarters
04:07 for mounting and ultimate adjusting the amp,
04:10 so we fabricated a bracket that eased securing and removing
04:12 the amp.
04:13 We glued it down with polyurethane adhesive.
04:16 Once we got all of the zones named, top, deck,
04:20 and subwoofer, then I went in and adjusted
04:23 the volume of each.
04:25 What I wanted to do was balance the speaker here
04:28 so close to our heads with those lower on the deck.
04:31 I wanted to take full advantage of those horn loaded speakers.
04:35 Then we brought in the subwoofer at a level that was pleasing
04:38 and had a pretty good thump.
04:40 Now the whole danger of this system
04:42 is that when you get it all finished,
04:44 you're pretty proud of it, and you really want to crank it up.
04:46 And around here, you know how noise travels over the water.
04:50 So we headed out, turned on some Aerosmith, some Kenny Loggins,
04:54 cranked it up, listened to the wind and the waves,
04:57 some really good rock and roll.
04:59 I'm Randy Vance for Kicker Marine Audio,
05:02 and that's how you put in a stereo.
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05:14 (music ends)
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