JL audio Mediamaster

Because every boater needs a soundtrack

The best thing I ever did was fit a marine hi-fi to my boat. Bama Breeze would crank up over the stereo as we powered on to the plane, heading home after a glorious hot sunny day on the water (it was a Wednesday this year). Of course these days, you don’t just screw a radio/cd player into the dash – it’s all about source connectivity. So the Mediamaster can run from a USB stick on to which you’ve downloaded your music, or it will Bluetooth direct to your phone or other compatible device. Or, there is an analogue auxiliary input so you could connect your gramophone player if it has an appropriate output, Grandad. Connect it to an iphone and it displays your phone’s music directly on its screen. It also has a tuner built in if you wish to simply listen to the radio.

The advantage of not having a CD drive, or needing to ‘swallow’ your ipod as some units do, is size. With no need to package these bulky items, you end up with a unit of about 6x4in (151mm x 99mm to be precise), of which most of the surface is screen – a 3.5in display in fact, (very useful, as anyone who’s tried to find Jimmy Buffet’s utterly chilled-out classic while bouncing along at 20 knots will confirm).

A very interesting facet of the Mediamaster is that it contains no in-built chip amp. Instead it provides eight channels of 4V RMS outputs, providing four zones of ‘clean’ digital signal to remote amplifiers for clear, crisp sound. These zones can be different areas (think saloon, cockpit, flybridge etc) and you can use a zone for direct supply to a subwoofer, allowing you to control bass volume independently (it is, as Meghan Trainor wisely opines, all about that bass – she’s less enamoured by the treble, apparently).

You can even have remote controls in each zone allowing you to control basic functions of the system (such as volume and track source) without recourse to accessing the head unit. NMEA 2000 data bus connection allows integration to on-board navigation displays.

Both the head unit and remote controls are Ip66-standard water and dust resistant, so can be mounted externally even in an area exposed to rain or sea spray.

JL Audio describes the unit as a ‘high-end source unit, unrivalled for sound quality and longevity’. Certainly it looks to be a fantastic module to build a quality audio set-up around. £499.99 inc VAT

Contact www.jlaudiomarine.eu