InformaCast-Compliant IP Speaker Overview Podcast

What they are and what you need to know.

Are you a building administrator or public safety official looking for new ways of communicating within your organization? Are you looking for ways to improve communications utilizing the investment you’ve already made in your overhead paging system or IP network?

Singlewire InformaCast-compliant IP speakers provide a cost effective way for deploying an overhead paging/mass notification system within any organization.

In this podcast we talk with John Hood, a sound system designer and consultant with Singlewire Software. We learn more about what this technology is and how it is being used within organizations of all industries.

Transcript

INTERVIEWER: We are talking with John Hood. John can you describe what you do?

JOHN HOOD: We are primarily in Northern California in Nevada and on behalf of the Singlewire I help maintain the relationship between the Voice over IP phone world and the speaker world. So I act as a loudspeaker educator for like Cisco resellers or anybody that is a voice over Ip reseller.

INTERVIEWER: In that capacity you are involved with the know about installations for putting speakers into everything from a hospital to a school to

JOHN HOOD:  you name it to retail, warehouses you know any places where you use speakers we have installed IP speakers.

INTERVIEWER: So you know what is an IP speaker?

JOHN HOOD: An IP speaker is a speaker with an amplifier built in so it is self-powered. It gets its electricity from Power over Ethernet (PoE) or from the switch, so it’s got a network cable homerun to it, and then that’s it. That’s how you hook it up.

You take a network cable from the switch directly to it and then we have software that lives on the same network that gets the sound to the IP speaker via the computer network.

INTERVIEWER:  Are you limited by the number of speakers you can put on the network?

JOHN HOOD: No. Well as many places as you have to plug a speaker in you could plug a speaker into it. And as long as the network has power over Ethernet, where there are those occasions where a network does not have power over the Ethernet switches and at that point we can locally power the amplifier on the speaker with the AC adapter. But that is very rare. Most schools or most folks that are considering IP speakers have already considered IP telephones. So they have already built the network backbone to support those appliances and so the speakers plug-in just the same way like the voice over IP phone do. They just plug-in and way they go.

INTERVIEWER: Now this is a new thing, is there much of a difference in terms of the sound quality or the number of speakers that are needed in a room for a coverage?

JOHN HOOD: No it’s all about the same.

Since there is no head end equipment with a IP speaker system, there is no head end – the speaker is everything. There is some software. But the cost of that head end equipment is advertised out through the individual IP speakers. So as an individual unit they look expensive, but as a entire system since there is nothing else to buy and nothing else to install and nothing else to maintain but those IP speakers. They end up being a lot more reasonable. In short run, long run- in any way you look at them. But as an individual thing the price can be kind of shocking.

INTERVIEWER:  What are some of the other advantages that come along with a IP speaker versus a traditional system?

JOHN HOOD:  Well an IP speaker is inherently supervised. Meaning because it is a network piece of gear, the network always checking to see if it is there or not and if it has got issues. An analog speaker isn’t.

When an analog speaker isn’t working they only to know is to have an active page and go listen for the most part. Some analog sound systems have supervisory capabilities but for the most part they aren’t.

So people have and in lot of schools you will see that the speakers don’t work and nobody knows or nobody cares. They are just over it.
You know because of the wire, somebody truncates through the cable or something happens a long time ago and nobody goes back to fix it and they don’t realize it because a facility person doesn’t have to be standing near when it is not working, when active page is happening.

Because In their standard state there is no way to tell whether they are working or not unless somebody is making a page. So it is a complex thing to go and tone them out and make sure if there are working.
With a IP speaker they all work all day long. And here I am. I am here.

INTERVIEWER:  Now does it look from a network perspective..does it look similar to a computer on the network?

JOHN HOOD:  Not being a big network guy, I am a sound guy. It looks like a pretty darn simple thing.

I look at a webpage and all my speakers are on it and they are either happy and everything is fine or they are red and it is bad. And if it is red and it is bad then I go to the speaker and see if it is plugged in or not and that’s usually thus far.. that’s been the only failure you could find speaker unplugged or speaker broke.

Now we have had some failures you know they all have been out of box initial failures like I have had, I don’t even know, maybe a couple where a speaker quote unquote stopped working and I am not positive if they actually did stop working or somebody unplugged them.

INTERVIEWER:  What is the way to get audio to the speaker? People are probably use to seeing a microphone on a desk, we pick it up…

JOHN HOOD:  We connect it to the phone system and so somebody is going to  pick up the phone dial up our extension, which we are software but you can connect to us in a bunch of different ways.

A Cisco call manager talks right through to us, most voice over IP phones systems can talk right to us through the network or if it’s older stuff, we are equipped with anybody’s analog telephone adapter to be able to talk to our software.. and it can just live on any machine.

INTERVIEWER: You wanna talk about how does an IP paging speaker work in connection with an analog system that may already be in place..for an upgrade or there is a new wing going up in a facility.
How does that work?

JOHN HOOD:   Well there is a bunch of different ways. So for somebody that is not involved with IP telephony or isn’t interested in voice over IP phone.

They way we work is that you take sound, just two little box and that changes it.. little boxes that are about 50 bucks, 60 bucks or whatever that will interface easily with any computer system. So it is not, so all you have to know from a facility standpoint is that I got a hand audio to this little box and a pair of a phone wires and if you can’t do that we have some converters, there are all kind of commercial pieces of equipment to get it into our box.

So you hand me a RJ 11, a phone wire plug it in  our box and the way we go, you don’t have to know all that much and as far as programming and operating it, I have scheduled training as the IP speaker guide.
Scheduled training with dozens of schools.. only may be a couple of times, did the customer not already know how to operate it by the time I got there.. cause our web interface is very very easy. It’s as easy as shopping on line.

You know I just basically create a zone drag my speakers into my zone to create a paging zone and that’s how it works and then I kind of assign that paging zone a number and then with my telephone I dial the number and boom sound comes out.

INTERVIEWER: Integration between analog system is something that happens every day?

JOHN HOOD:   Sure, it happens every day now. Before there was but still happens. But the digital telephone.. I mean this has been going on for quite a while. You know phones were just purely analog devices and then they became more and more digital and now there are you know internet devices or network devices.. so this is not like some brand new magical  technology that came.. this isn’t some scary wiz bang way we are doing thing, this is stuff that has been going on for a very long time, we are just packaging it now into a speaker.

So we have been hooking up analog phones into IP phones. I mean you have no idea whether the customer or the person you are talking to you on the other end is talking over a voiceover I phone or Vonage or whatever and it is going to be a same thing with the speakers. There is ultimately going to be totally seamless.

Right now there are plenty of commercially available boxes to make that transition for us.

INTERVIEWER:   Finally real quick is this an internal only speaker solution for inside buildings or there are options for going outside too?

JOHN HOOD: AtlasSound has been making outdoor speakers forever but there are all kinds of electronic equipment that lives outdoors. There is tons of stuff so. We have a circuitboard manufacturer for us that will survive in whatever elements there are. We put it in a weatherized enclosure and you know away we go.

We have IP end points for outdoor usage that are meant to be out there and stainless steel enclosures that will last for zillion years.  I don’t know if zillions maybe slightly less, maybe mazillions.