Re: I want to build a sweet stereo setup...
First of all, whoever came up with the idea of mounting speakers on a wakeboard tower...should be shot. In many situations, people who are 150 feet away from you do not want to hear your stereo. If you end up with flare guns, fired across your bow, garbage and or beer cans thrown at you, or your skier being cut-off...perhapps you should think twice about this. With all of that said, if you want a serious stereo, it requires POWER, from your amps and from your power source (batteries). Forget about finding a powerful head unit...might possibly work in a car, will not come anywhere close to working in a boat! You need one or more very powerful amplifiers to get the job done. It is not uncommon to have an amp that will produce over 100 watts per channel for each speaker at 8 or four ohms to get some real spl (sound pressure level). That is for mid/high frequencies, for bass, such as with a 10 or 12 inch subwoofer, you will need 200-400 watts per speaker to "feel" this. Lets say a 50 watt x 4 Head unit(for the boat), and eq's/crossovers and lets say a 4 channal amp for the mid /highs at 100 watts each at 4 ohms, that would be about 33 amps of power consumption at 12 volts. Lets add two 12 inch subwoofers at 200 watts each...that's another 33 amps. So, with everything, lets just round up...your sound system needs about 85 amps for full output. So, we can figure a seperate battery for the sound system, and you had better have a good alternator to keep it charged (not from an outboard). A re-cap of this would be a head unit that has four outputs of about 50 watts each, to feed four 6 1/2 two ways in the boat, then a four channel amp to feed four 6 1/2" or 8 inch two ways for the wake tower and a seperate amp of 200 watts each for two 12 inch subwoofers ( if you like dance or rap music)...double the subwoofer power.
