Don't waste money on 'marine grade' speakers.
In my experience with this (which, as I have been a musician as well as a sailor and boatbuilder, has been considerable) there is NO SUCH THING as marine-grade weatherproof exterior speakers for sailboats. There are only much more expensive products for sale that will rot out just like everything else. That said-- we have traditionally bought decent but inexpensive automotive stereo components, like a $150 AM-FM-CD and maybe $50 mylar speakers, and figured they'd get replaced every three years. I am sure that whatever Hunter or other manufacturers are installing costs more than that because of being 'marine grade'. Do a cost analysis and you'll see that replacing it every three years is cheaper than one for three times as much money that won't last more than twice as long. At Cherubini (and thus on my new boat) we sort of devised a system for cockpit speakers that you might consider. Go to Radio Shack and buy the expensive gold RCA terminals and install them in the cockpit-seat lockers. Use heat-shrink tape on all solder joints. Get a decent pair of speaker boxes and use a quality pair of phone cords to plug them into the jacks. At the dock, take them out and stand them on the deck or cockpit seats; at sea, seal them in a plastic bag and hide them in a locker below. My brother designed and made a neat pair of boxes out of white-overlay (bulkhead) plywood with rubber feet on the bottoms and small Herreshoff cleats for handles on top that you wrapped the cord around. They were the talk of the boat. BTW-- I can't seem to find a stereo WITHOUT a removable face these days. Is anyone able to tell if removable-face in-dash stereos actually last? --or do the contacts for that expensive little face plate (that can't keep salt slime out of the CD slot) corrode into nothing from humidty and salt air? JC
