Installing a stereo system - UPDATE 5th February 08

Update - Tuesday 5th February
Yesterday morning I attempted to fit the stereo again. I was on it by 8am and by 9.30am I was dancing around the boat with the dogs. It was the first time I've felt the cabin floor vibrate with a pounding bass since I've been on the boat - it made me cry with joy! Really - I did cry.

Only one speaker working unfortunately - I gave it another 2 hours of my time before moving on to more important jobs. The remaining speakers need some work. But to the acoustically deprived ear, it sounds amazing. Hooray for me!

My original plea
Left: Monty's electrics - badly in need of an overhaul.

Right: Can anyone tell me what this is? All the speaker cables run via this.

There are only two material possessions that I owned on land that I miss. My bed and my stereo. I had a beautiful Marantz amp and KI Signature CD player rigged up to four great speakers via wiring that I had hand/ear picked for perfection. The sound quality used to make me cry with pleasure.

Now, all I have is my laptop with some shite portable speakers. It doesn't do my music justice, I'm driving Tim mad by playing breakbeat with no bass and it's about time I did something about it.

So, before leaving Greece, I took my fairly decent CD/MP3 player out of my car hoping to be able to wire it up in here. The problems started when I looked at the wiring that had been used for the old CD player in here - bloody appalling mess and I haven't a clue where to start. So I took the simple route and started again - the previous simple route was replicating exactly what the previous owner had done - but I tell you, that wasn't simple. I am struggling - the email to the Yachting and Boating World liveaboard forum tells the tale - can anyone help me please?

(Mum - please don't worry - I am not about to electrocute myself or set the boat on fire (I hope))

My post to the YBW Liveaboard Forum
Right then - on a related thread - in desperation I turned to the forum last night as I struggled to install my Pioneer CD/MP3 player car stereo on my boat. It just won't work. I am a complete novice at this but it seemed a relatively straightforward task (ha - is anything straightforward on a 25 year old, badly wired boat). I don't want it to do anything fancy - I don't have a remote etc - I just want the damned thing to play CDs and be able to plug my laptop into it via the aux cable. So, the way I see it at the most basic level, if I wire the yellow (positive) to a positive and the black (ground/negative) to a negative wire, it should work - yes? The circuits at the boat end are all good - I've tested them. I know there are no speakers connected at this point but the unit should surely turn on if there is power going to it?Anyway, it didn't work so then I thought that the red ACC cable, which is usually connected via the car ignition, should also have power going through it to fool the stereo into thinking the ignition is on. So I took the second yellow positive (splits off the main positive before it goes into the block that plugs into the stereo) and connected it to the red ACC cable which then goes into the block that plugs into the stereo. So, theoretically, there should be 12v going through both cables now. It still won't work.Am I missing something?There are some additional cables which I do not know whether they need to be connected up or not. An orange cable which says Illumination/dash light and a blue one Power Antenna. I'm yet to get to the speaker bit. There is a horrible cat's nest of wires wired through wires wired through wires, old and new, some redundant, some not, some should be - a result of 20 years of people fitting stereos into the same spot. i just want to make sure I can get the unit working before I attempt to sort that bit out.

HELP!