Video Transcript
PA Router Control Panel
4m 41s
00:06
Okay, now I think we’ve legitimately covered
00:09
everything that’s in the control panel of the virtual Page station.
00:12
I haven’t yet showed you the PA router’s control panel.
00:16
Let’s open this up. Here we have the management and
00:21
resources of everything that’s happening in your PA system.
00:25
Let me zoom out just a little bit so you can see the whole thing.
00:28
You’ll see that it is noted in rows.
00:31
Each of the rows is a different zone,
00:34
and this is one of the reasons why it was really
00:36
important to go and define the names of those
00:38
zones in the administrator earlier.
00:39
This is because that gets propagated down here as well,
00:42
so you don’t have to guess what each zone is.
00:44
You can’t change this; this isn’t a label that I can type into.
00:47
This comes from the administrator.
00:48
Generally speaking, for each of these zone areas,
00:52
you’re getting some gain control over what’s happening in that area.
00:56
So here’s my main output for each zone.
00:58
For all of Zone One, I could choose to mute the entire zone.
01:02
I could choose to change the gain of everything that passes through that zone.
01:07
I could also choose something called squelch priority.
01:10
Squelch priority allows you to say that certain levels of
01:16
announcements will not play in this zone.
01:19
So let’s say that you are in the executive boardroom and you’re in a meeting.
01:26
That executive boardroom might normally get that
01:28
food truck announcement that I talked about earlier,
01:30
but if it’s an important meeting,
01:32
I don’t think we should be interrupting it with the food truck announcement.
01:35
So you change the squelch priority and say,
01:38
“Hey, anything at this level and lower will simply not be played.”
01:43
If it tries to come in, it gets squelched;
01:45
it gets smashed down and does not get played.
01:49
If you put your squelch priority at the highest priority,
01:51
then nothing will ever play in this zone.
01:53
Don’t do that; that’s a bad idea.
01:55
But this is a way of just making sure that different
01:57
areas can get access to different types of announcements,
02:00
regardless of whether or not someone is trying to page them.
02:03
You can say,
02:03
“No, whenever the conference room is active,
02:06
we are going to change the squelch priority in this
02:08
room with some control logic to make sure that it is
02:12
emergency announcements only.”
02:13
And then, once the conference is over,
02:15
we change the squelch priority back.
02:17
You do all that automatically;
02:18
the users never even understand what’s happening.
02:20
I’m going to leave mine at no squelch.If something is squelched,
02:25
you do have this LED that shows up.
02:27
Once again, what’s an LED? It’s a one or zero;
02:30
it’s a true or a false.
02:31
That means that you can use that to have something
02:33
else happen in your design.
02:35
If the zone is active at all,
02:37
you’ll get this LED that shows up,
02:38
and then it shows you what is playing in this zone.
02:42
So if I have something that’s playing,
02:44
it’ll tell me what page station it came from
02:46
and what priority level it is set at.
02:50
Then you have some general control over the gain of
02:54
everything that comes through that zone.
02:55
You can mute all pages, change the gain of all pages,
02:58
mute all messages, and change the gain of all messages as well.
03:02
I’m going to just show you this really quick.
03:04
So I’ll once again launch that announcement from my page station.
03:09
We can see now that zones that are…
03:14
I’ll mute this just so you can see it rather than hear it.
03:18
I can see all three of these are coming through.
03:20
If, while that’s playing,
03:21
I go to my virtual Page station and I’m going to send a
03:25
high-priority announcement as well…
03:30
Actually, I’ll do it the other way around.
03:31
I’ll send a low-priority message just to Zone Three.
03:38
I’ll play that. We can see that that is occurring here.
03:41
Then I’ll launch this higher announcement from the physical Page station.
03:44
Boom! You can see that it got interrupted,
03:46
and now we’re playing the higher one instead.
03:49
So you can keep track of everything that’s happening,
03:51
see where the stations are getting their information from,
03:55
and what is playing.
03:56
You actually even see the message in that message
03:57
field of what announcement it is.
04:00
Down here at the bottom, you also get to see a buffer—
04:02
how much of your storage memory is currently
04:06
reserved for messages that are in the queue.
04:09
You might want to keep an eye on that.
04:11
You have the option to cancel everything that is
04:13
playing or cancel everything that’s in the queue
04:16
and kind of flush out that cache.
04:19
Alright, that’s the PA router control panel.
04:23
So what is left?
04:26
We haven’t yet actually finished our signal paths.
04:28
We need to put in our ducking system.
04:32
We’ll do that.
04:34
Let’s take a quick break, and we’ll do that next.