Hey All,

I have a friend that moved to a new office space. It's two floors of a large building with mostly cubes/work space around the outside and some meeting rooms, elevators and break room space on the inside.

In his old office they had a system with a button of sorts that would play a gong sound when there was a great sale or event. He would like something similar in the new space.

What is a good approach here...

TIA,
Tom

Is that really all its for? Cheap 70 volt system with this [Link: doc-diy.net]

Do you intend to put in a whole-space background music system? A paging system? Just a few speakers here and there with a gong kind of sound?

Whatever you do, if it's more than two or four speakers, use PA equipment and 70 volt speakers. And no, "70 volt" does not mean crappy sound (unless you're only going to spend five bucks on each speaker!).

One of my clients uses a Gilderfluke product -- a stereo SD playback device with built-in 20 watt per channel Class D amplifier. It can be programmed to play something with a voltage pulse. Just to demonstrate its versatility: she wanted Buddhist chant music to play in the entry when someone walked in. I put a PIR sensor in the room and set it to trigger ramp up of volume followed by ramp down thirty seconds after the last pulse from the PIR.

It's been "playing" for maybe a dozen years at this point. No moving parts. If you used this and replaced the chant with a gong recording, you'd have a push button controlled gong sound.

Yes, this is NOT a 70 volt product, but Gilderfluke probably has 70 volt amps, too. They're worth checking out just for the cool name, great logo, and bizarre panoply of products.

EDIT: Cool. While I was writing, Mac came up with a probably cheaper way to do the same thing.

Thanks, Guys. Cool stuff.

Lemme throw another twist in. The same guy also has a break area with 5 TVs (all component) running with an ancient AMX matrix. We made it work when he first moved in. For said 5 TVs, there are 5 basic, tiny Comcast boxes in the closet, with no control system. You can imagine how fun that is to adjust.

Thinking out loud for all of this, I could run a Control 4 EA-3 controller and remote (has 6 IR out) for that break area, treating each TV and cable box as a room, basically. He can easily make changes at that point.

Next, use the USB input on the controller for the Gong sound I need (with a flash drive), then run the audio out to a 70 volt amp. (then figure out placement, coverage, wattage etc). He could then ring the bell through the C4 app? Or a conveniently placed keypad... I can email support on that to check...

Tommy,
that sounds cool and workable.

Yes, to change the subject... for some reason this reminds me of an off the wall solution I worked out in the mid 90s.

A sports bar added five TVs on a wall -- one really big RPTV with four smaller TVs around it. Each TV was fed by a DirecTV receiver, for which RF control was not an option at this point. The question was, how do we let the bartender choose different channels on the different DirecTV receivers?

I came up with the clunky but perfect idea of having the cabinet guy build a fixture that stacked up the IR sensors, one on top of another, each in its own wooden tube, with the sensors about a foot back inside each tube. To control a DirecTV receiver, you'd stick the front end of the remote into the appropriate tube, then hit buttons.

To turn all the receivers on or off, you'd back up a few feet and shoot an OFF or ON command at the entire stack of tubes.

Ah, inventing control hardware that included wood!

I hope this is understandable. It's a lot shorter than it might have been.

Would a simple door chime suffice? Why resort to high tech stuff?

buzz,
Killjoy.

Because door chimes cant sound like this!

If one needs some tech: