Hot Tub Speakers - Help

[jayson]

I have a Saratoga spas hot tub that has four pop up speakers in each corner. The system has what appears to be a car stereo mounted in the side of the skirting. My hot tub is on our screened in porch, which I recently wired speakers to run off of my surround sound system which I play the Sirius Radio off of Dish Network. I would like to wire the hot tub speakers so that everything is playing the same music. I was thinking of running speaker wires to the tub, with an on/off dial to help control the volume. Do I run the risk of blowing out the hot tub speakers? I can't find anything that indicates their size. Is this even possible to do? Any advice is appreciated

[Spa Dude]

Weddings have jack s*#t to do with the wiring of speakers!

Without knowing what output the speakers are capable of handling, it would be a risk to wire them up and hope they can take it. Is there nothing anywhere on the spa that states what wattage they are? If you do go ahead and wire them up, at least if you have a seperate volume control for them you can keep them low, preventing them from being blown.

[Roger]

I have a Saratoga spas hot tub that has four pop up speakers in each corner. The system has what appears to be a car stereo mounted in the side of the skirting. My hot tub is on our screened in porch, which I recently wired speakers to run off of my surround sound system which I play the Sirius Radio off of Dish Network. I would like to wire the hot tub speakers so that everything is playing the same music. I was thinking of running speaker wires to the tub, with an on/off dial to help control the volume. Do I run the risk of blowing out the hot tub speakers? I can't find anything that indicates their size. Is this even possible to do? Any advice is appreciated

Look at the output of your surround. Compare it to the capacity of your speakers or the output of the tub stereo. Or wing it and see if they blow!! They are just cheap marine speakers anyway.

[reeffreak]

Marine / Car stereo speakers are typically 4 ohm, while home audio gear is usually 8 ohm. This means that the hot tub speakers will likely present twice the load to your home theater amplifier. This is usually more of a problem for the amplifier than the speaker, but at the levels you'll be running, this shouldn't be a problem. If you home theater has settings to configure individual speakers to large or small, choose small. This will limit output on the low end, which is what would otherwise trash the tiny woofers on your tub speakers.

If you use common sense and not overdrive the speakers, you won't blow them. A volume control is not a bad idea, especially if you are trying to balance the sound of these speakers with others on the porch. Otherwise you'll be overdriving the tub speakers with much lower levels from your others (the tub speakers have half the resistance of home speakers and therefore will pull 2x the current).

Also, if you are wiring the tub speakers to the same speaker terminals as the other speakers on your system you will further shift the impedance of the circuit. How you wire it up is important (especially since you're already thinking of using a 4 ohm speaker on an 8 ohm receiver). Search on series versus parallel speaker wiring for more details and pros/cons of each. If you have a dedicated bus (i.e. speakers "b" for tub" then you don't have to worry about this). Your volume control will also affect load.

I'm not so worried about compatibility of the speakers, but I would suggest you look into the code / safety issues. Speakers are low voltage, but you are in fact mingling the wiring of an ungrounded, non-gfci connected device (e.g. home stereo) with water. I did want to bring it up as something to look into (I don't know the code). It doesn't apply to your built-in marine stereo, because that device is wired through the common GFCI and grounded and bonded as part of the hot tub equipment.

[spawn]

With your tub in your screened in porch you have an opportunity to mount some decent speakers in the porch, powered by your surround sound system. I was not sure if you had done this already and just wanted to add the hot tub speakers or were going to only have the tub speakers. I'll admit that I have not heard your tub speakers but I would bet that the sound from decent speakers mounted in the porch would be much better than the tub speakers. And I believe that the sound from only the proch mounted speakers would be better than having the additional sound from the tub speakers. Sorry for the confusing post - hope you understand the point.

[jayson]

I think I will just install a separate speaker in close proximity to the tub. I just like that the speakers are right behind your head, so the location is ideal to sit back, relax and enjoy the music. I thought that I was running the chance of having them blow, hence the dial switch and I was planning on running them off the B channel. Thanks, now I'll just have to start shopping for speakers.

[belome]

I mounted these in my soffits pointing down. I have nothing but nice things to say about them.

http://www.jr.com/yamaha/pe/YAM_NSAW350_hy_WH/

You can find them cheaper, I made JR price match another site.