Video Transcript
Terminology
9m 26s
00:06
Welcome to a nice, long, detailed,
00:10
in-depth overview of public address.
00:14
We will cover all of the elements, components,
00:16
and areas in CES Designer software that you will need
00:19
to touch in order to integrate our robust public address
00:23
paging system into whatever design you may be integrating.
00:28
Public address is used in a wide variety of different types of installations,
00:32
largely in the entertainment and hospitality worlds.
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We’re talking about things like hotels, theme parks,
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and transportation—announcements that you hear
00:41
at the airport, for example.
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However, it could be used in smaller areas too.
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Anytime you need to send an announcement to a specific area,
00:49
you might be using the public address tools that are here in the software.
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Now, everything that we’re going to touch on,
00:54
generally speaking, isn’t that complicated.
00:57
This is not an advanced class or tutorial.
01:00
This is nothing that you’re going to need any
01:01
scripting knowledge or coding for.
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Everything’s pretty straightforward,
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but it is a really wide subject.
01:08
It does touch your design in a really sort of spider-veiny manner,
01:12
in which it reaches out and touches everything and everywhere.
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We’re going to be doing a lot of bouncing
01:17
back and forth between the design schematics,
01:20
the administrator, the control panels, the hardware devices,
01:24
and the touch panels.
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So, it does take some time to go into the detail
01:30
that we want you to have.
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That’s why this is going to be done in this nice,
01:34
long format of training videos.
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Hopefully, it’s still going to be worth your time.
01:38
If you’re learning about public address, this is the place to be.
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Public address, I know, is one of the biggest fears
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that everyone has in the world.
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It’s right up there with moving and death, right?
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Those are the top three fears: talking in front of people.
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Well, fortunately, I’m the only one who has to talk here.
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You just have to learn.
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And in order to learn, we have to make sure you have the right vocabulary.
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So, behind me are some vocabulary words.
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There will not be a test on this, don’t worry.
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Actually, I think there might be a test.
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There may be a test on this. Definitely worry.
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We want to make sure that you all have the same
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nomenclature when we’re talking about these elements.
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So, what are the things that make up a public address system?
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First of all, a page station.
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A page station is going to be the source of anything
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that we send to our paging world.
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Now, this could manifest in one of two different ways.
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It could be a physical page station.
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We have physical page stations that we sell.
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Here’s a PS600 model.
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This has a handheld microphone on it.
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You can grab it and talk into it.
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It’s got various buttons on it for you to trigger preset commands,
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things like that.
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This might be the way that you integrate with your paging system.
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But we’ve noticed that most people don’t tend to go this route.
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Most people prefer to go with what we’re going to call a virtual page station.
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A virtual page station is really any combination
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of your ability to speak into the system and interact with it.
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That physical page station had keys and a microphone.
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A virtual page station will show itself by having another
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microphone that you can talk into and a touch panel.
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So, if you’ve already got a UCI in your design that does
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all kinds of things, gives your user access to all of the
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things in the room that they need to control,
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you might just be adding a page to that touch screen
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that allows them to interact with the paging system.
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Any microphone in the world will be fine for them to talk into.
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It can be a Dante microphone, a direct analog microphone,
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or a USB microphone that you plug into a
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USB-A port on a device and bring it that way.
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You could do a page from a headset.
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It doesn’t matter how the audio gets in.
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That’s a page station.
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I’ll show you how to set all those up.
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That’s the source. It’s where we’re sending things from.
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The places that we’re sending them to are called zones.
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A zone could be a single loudspeaker.
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Maybe you’ve got one room with one loudspeaker
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up in the ceiling, and that is the zone.
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A zone could be, honestly, a thousand loudspeakers.
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If you have a big area and you never need to divide
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that area into a smaller geographical chunk to get a
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dedicated page there,
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then that is a zone.
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I mean, think about something like all the main
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causeways in a shopping mall.
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You’re probably not paging just the East Wing versus the West Wing.
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You’re probably sending pages to the entire shopping mall
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so that when little Billy is lost, you can find his parents, right?
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So, if that’s the case, maybe all of those loudspeakers
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that are in that area might be a single zone.
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The point is that a zone—just don’t think of it as a room,
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don’t think of it as a channel—think of it as a geographical area,
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again, that you would have no cause to
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ever split up into a smaller geographical area.
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Okay, so what are we sending to these zones?
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We’re sending either pages or messages.
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A page is anytime a human voice is involved in that announcement.
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So, if I’m talking into a microphone live,
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then that microphone is open, it’s going out into the system,
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and I am coming out of the loudspeakers, right?
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That’s a page.
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Pages could be handled in different ways.
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You might be talking into a hot mic.
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You might be talking into a mic that then records
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your voice and sends it a little bit later.
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But those are all pages because a microphone is involved.
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Whereas a message is an audio file. It is any kind of audio file.
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It could be a pre-recorded message.
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I mean, it’s still a human voice that’s going out,
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so I guess when I said it’s a human voice, that’s a page,
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that’s not quite accurate.
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You could record your voice ahead of time,
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and then that’s an audio file, an MP3 or a WAV file, whatever,
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that you’re sending out.
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It could be music on there.
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It could be all kinds of different things.
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But a finished file before you launch the system,
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that is a message.
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Whereas when you’re talking into a microphone,
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that’s a page.
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They’re handled in very, very similar ways,
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but there’s a little bit of nuance in the ways
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that they might be handled.
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So, when you hear “page” and “message,”
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just know that those are different types of announcements.
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Now, how to do that?
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If you’re watching this class, these videos,
06:21
you should be able to figure out for yourself
06:23
how to get a microphone channel into CUSIS
06:25
and send it to an output.
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You should know how to play an audio file
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from an audio player and send it to an output.
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That’s easy.
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That’s not what a paging system is.
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What a paging system is,
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is the ability to take all of that and synthesize
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it for when there’s a lot of traffic.
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What happens when you have two different page stations
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that are sending different pages or messages
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to a zone at the same time?
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You don’t want them to just show up at the same
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time and be mixed together.
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That sounds terrible.
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I can’t hear anything they’re saying because you’re
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playing them at the same time.
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You need a system that manages it.
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So, when we come to management,
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there are a couple of different things to keep in mind.
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The first one is the concept of priority.
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We need to be able to make sure that different
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types of announcements have a higher or lower
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priority compared to other announcements,
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so we know when one should be more important than the other.
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If you’ve got an emergency announcement,
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that’s got to be the highest priority,
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and we want to be able to cancel anything else that’s playing,
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duck it down, replace it.
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Maybe the thing that gets removed has to go and
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wait its turn and come back again.
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We have all kinds of different things
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that we can do to determine priority.
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A page station itself could have its own priority.
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A page could have its priority.
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You can override that priority system in
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either direction based on your preferences.
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There are a lot of ways you can specify that priority,
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but understanding it is going to be important.
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And then queuing is the other half of it.
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I mentioned if a page gets interrupted by a higher priority page,
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it might have to go and wait its turn again.
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That’s part of a management system.
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We need to make sure that if multiple announcements
08:00
are going to a zone at the same time,
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they know that they have to wait their turn in
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order of their priority.
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You’ve got to determine what happens if it
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sits in that queue for a really long time.
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Is it still relevant?
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Do you want to throw it out because it’s been
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sitting in the queue for an hour?
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What do you want to do if it gets booted
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multiple times from being played and then goes back into the queue?
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These are all really minute details,
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but you have the ability to customize all of them in
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your paging system,
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which again is why this takes a good long time
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to really look at all of the details and what we can touch.
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The last piece that makes it a real paging system is ducking.
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I kind of mentioned this earlier too.
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When an announcement is played in a room,
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you don’t want the music that’s already playing
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in that room to keep playing because
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now you can’t hear anything, right?
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If the music is playing, especially if there’s vocals in that music,
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and you’re playing an announcement that’s
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just mixed in with that,
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no one’s going to be able to understand it.
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So, we want some method that will duck
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down the existing program material in a room when
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a page is present and then return it back to its
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regular volume when the page is complete.
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That is a ducking system.
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So, page stations, zones, pages, messages, priority,
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queuing, and ducking—that’s the vocab test.
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You’ll hear all those words a lot over the
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next several videos on this.
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So, hopefully, you’ve got that.
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Take a quick break.
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We are then going to dive into the software.