Two of my speakers crackle at high volume.
 

My boat has six stock kicker speakers. Four in the rear which are wired to a 4 channel amp and two in the bow that are wired to the head unit. When i turn the radio up loud the two bow speakers start to make a crackle sound. What could be causing this? What can i do to solve the problem?

UMM, the head unit? Blown speakers in the bow? Turn the gain up a little on the amp so you can achieve the same volume on those speakers at a lower level on the headunit, that way you are not at max output for the deck .

Turning up the gain would work, but the reason i'm turning them up high is so the tower speakers are louder. I feel like if i turned the gain up on the cabins the bow speakers would crackle before the towers are loud enough to hear while riding. The towers are running off of a separate amp and so far i haven't found a way to fade more sound to the tower speakers and less to the in boat speakers. I've messed with the balance and fade on the head unit but that just turns all the speakers louder or all quieter.

I think your missing what I am saying. If your system is wired the way you originally posted. TOWER wired too 4 channel amp. BOW wired to head unit power. Turn the gain up on the amp, at the amp. That allows your TOWER speakers to play at a louder volume at a lower volume on the head unit. This will keep your bow speakers out of the distortion , and your TOWERS will be louder. Example. NOW you have to turn up your head unit to max, 30, 40 whatever it may be for your towers will be loud enough. Turn your amp gain up slighly so your head unit is at say.....25, and your TOWER speakers are as loud as possible without distortion. Now your BOW speakers are only at 25 instead of 30. They are happy, and your tower is loud like you want,OR....... Buy another amp for the bow speakers and have someone install it.

The muddy Brazos. Yumm!

This is most certainly not a gain setting issue on either amp, so please dont monkey with the gain trying to fix it. What you are hearing from the bow speakers at high volume levels is called "clipping". Basically, the head unit is running out of gas. It's not able to deliver as steady as a signal to the bow speaker as the rears are getting from the amp. You need to wire the 2 bows to the amp.

The bow speakers need to be on chnls one and two, and the 4 in the main cabin need to be on three and four - 2 on port side wired in parallel (+ to +/- to -) on chnl 3 and same with the starboard speakers on chnl4.

I guess what we need to know, are the tower speakers on an amp? I would hope so. Just sounds like it's somethin that could be tuned for with the exsisting setup. I had a boat that was very similar to thi ssetup years ago. As Mike says you could also run all 6 of the cabin speakers off that amp safely, but I don't know how comfortable you are with that.

I think he stated: 4 in main cabin on amp, 2 in bow on head-unit, towers on their own amp.

What head unit do you have? Fading doesnt increase volume, it simply reduces volume to the half you are fading from. In other words, fading to "rear" doesnt make the rear speakers louder, it makes the front quiter. If the tower speakers arent loud enough, you need either more power to them, if they can handle it. More info needed on this!

Ya Mike. Think your right. Second post kinda threw me and I didn't really fully re read the original post. Definetly more info is needed.

So here is the exact set up. The head unit is a kenwood not sure of the model number whatever came stock in the 08 mobius lsv. There are six cabin speakers total. Two in the bow that are powered by the head unit. And four in rear that are powered by a kicker zx200.4. The tower speakers are a pair of bullet 770hp hlcds. The tower speakers are powered by a jl audio g4500 four channel amp. There were two problems that i solved today. The tower speakers were wired to channels 1 and 2 by the installer instead of bridged. After i bridged the amp the tower speakers were a bit louder. The other thing i did was move the rca's. The installer hooked the input rca's for the tower amp to the kicker cabin speaker amp. I hooked it up so the tower amp was getting its input straight from the head unit instead of the kicker amp. Now i can fade down the cabin speakers while the towers remain loud and vice versa.
Tige Mike is this how you were saying i should wire up the cabin speakers if i decide to do so. Sorry about the crude ms paint diagram.
http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k5...kerdiagram.jpg

Yes, that will make the best use of what you have, although the Kicker zx200.2 is not a very powerful amp.