Video Transcript
BGM Ducking
7m 3s
00:06
The second option is that we can use
00:09
a ducking system that’s built into the PA router already.
00:12
The PA router is the master of knowing when
00:15
it’s sending an announcement out to each of these zones, right?
00:18
That’s what it does. You don’t need to second guess
00:21
whether someone’s taken a pause in their
00:23
breath while they’re giving a live page
00:26
when the PA router knows that it’s still
00:28
issuing a live page. The PA router is actually a
00:30
little bit cleaner in knowing specifically what
00:34
it is sending to those zones and whether or not it’s
00:37
time to duck something out of those zones.
00:40
We do that by exposing its BGM pins.
00:45
So, in the properties, I’ve got a BGM input count.
00:49
I can choose, in this case, to add five possible
00:54
background music sources to flow through the PA router.
00:58
Now, the way this is intended is this is intended
01:02
to be background music. It’s intended for you to
01:05
be able to have, you know, a couple of different
01:08
types of audio players or streaming music services
01:11
that come into your system and can be sent to each
01:14
of these zones just as ambient music in the background.
01:17
And then, when an announcement is sent to that zone,
01:20
the background music fades and comes back again.
01:22
That’s what it’s intended for. But you could use
01:26
it for more than background music. You could use it
01:29
for all of the program material that’s in the room.
01:33
That’s what I’m going to use it for.
01:34
So, rather than this priority ducker in the lobby,
01:38
I could take the output of my compensator and say,
01:40
“This is lobby to PA router,” and that goes to BGM1.
01:50
And in my conference room, I’m going to say,
01:53
“This is conference room to PA router,” and that’s
01:56
going to go to BGM2. BGM1, we just need to make sure,
02:04
goes and is routed to zone one, and then BGM2 gets
02:08
sent to zone two. We can do that in one of two ways.
02:12
You could open up the PA router, and once you have
02:14
BGM inputs, oops, then you’ve got a new section on the r
02:19
ight that is basically a router. Here are all of your BGM
02:26
inputs: one, two, three, four, five. And you need to
02:29
choose which one goes to each destination.
02:31
Now, the reason why it’s a router like this is because
02:34
if you’re using these as background sources, and one
02:35
of them is, like, you know, the jazz music, and one of
02:38
them is the disco music, whatever it is, you can choose
02:42
and use these like radio stations and pick what you want
02:44
to go into the room. We’re going to use it for a different
02:46
method in which we are simply going to make sure that
02:49
we assign the incoming room to the outgoing zone.
02:52
So, zone one gets BGM1, zone two gets BGM2, three,
02:58
four, and five. That way, we’ve created a one-to-one
03:01
association of each of these input pins to each of those output pins.
03:05
There’s an easier way to do it. Instead of doing that manually,
03:10
you could look at a property of the PA router that is
03:13
called BGM input per zone, and I’m going to just put
03:19
that to “yes.” When you put that to “yes,” it automatically
03:23
creates one BGM pin for each of the zones you’ve already created,
03:27
and it automatically associates those with each other.
03:30
There is no longer a routing option in here. Instead,
03:33
there’s just a gain control for that BGM. So, that’s
03:37
what I want to do. BGM input per zone is turned on,
03:40
and now I have just automatically routed and taken
03:44
my lobby path, flowing it through the PA router and
03:48
then back again to the outputs of that room.
03:51
I’ll reconnect my outputs, and we are done.
03:55
We’re done because now the PA router knows what
03:58
to do when it’s sending an announcement in that area, right?
04:00
It knows that it’s sending a page or a message, and it will duck it down.
04:04
You do still have a couple of controls. So, you’ve got,
04:08
in your background music section again, you do have an attack knob,
04:13
a depth knob, and a release knob. That’s for the BGM ducker.
04:16
Same thing as we saw in the priority ducker.
04:18
The attack knob tells you how quickly the background
04:21
music will be ducked down.
04:23
The depth knob is how far down it will be ducked,
04:26
and then the release knob is how long it will take
04:28
to return that back to its normal level after
04:31
the announcement is complete. We don’t need a
04:33
hold control because, again, we’re not waiting for
04:35
any pauses anymore. The PA router knows when
04:38
the message is done because it has completed its action.
04:41
That is option two, and maybe that’s the right choice
04:45
for you in this case. Some people might not like it because now,
04:48
when I look at my lobby signal path, all of a sudden,
04:50
my lobby signal path breaks and then goes to the PA
04:53
router and comes back again. If these are on different pages,
04:55
you might have a hard time keeping track of things.
04:57
By the way, I still need to update my reference in the room,
05:00
so my lobby output would now be my reference in that room.
05:04
Same thing in the conference room.
05:06
Now it looks like the single path breaks.
05:07
You may have to track it down.
05:08
Maybe this is more confusing to some people,
05:11
but the point is you’ve got options on how you want to handle it,
05:16
whether you are taking the zones to the zone signal
05:20
paths or bringing the signal paths to the PA router.
05:24
Totally up to you. And you know, it’s also worth noting that in a
05:28
room like this, where I’ve got an HDMI display in the room,
05:32
I could even send the paging announcements to the display itself.
05:36
I could override the audio that is on the HDMI that’s
05:39
being sent to that room. You can take an HDMI display,
05:42
and you can enable its audio source to change
05:47
to its own audio input pins, which means that I could
05:51
have another priority ducker here that overrides the
05:54
HDMI and replaces it with the announcements in the
05:58
room to make sure that even the displays in your room
06:01
are part of your paging system.
06:03
That way, you’re not listening to the program or the
06:07
movie or whatever that’s playing while the emergency
06:09
announcement is going. That will help duck down the
06:12
media content in your room while an announcement
06:15
is playing as well. So, think about that.
06:17
Sometimes a zone can be more than just loudspeakers.
06:20
A zone could be literally a TV in the room that
06:23
you can control the HDMI from.
06:26
Okay, we’re so close. We’re so close. Hang on tight there.
06:30
We’ve got our messages and our announcements.
06:33
We’ve got our UCI that sends anything we want.
06:35
We’ve got our commands. We’ve got our priority system.
06:38
We’ve got the queuing system.
06:41
We’ve got the ducking system.
06:44
The only thing I haven’t covered yet is what
06:46
happens when you want to send one page from
06:50
one core to another core.
06:54
Core-to-core paging. That’s our last step.
06:57
Let’s take a break. We’ll look at that.