Public address and voice evacuation
Speaker systems that can be understood, not just heard — announcements day to day, and evacuation instructions when it matters.
- Scope
- Survey → commissioning → AMC
- Typical use
- Malls, hospitals, plants, campuses
A sounder says something is wrong; a voice says what to do
People respond faster and more predictably to a spoken instruction than to a bell. In a mall, a hospital, a station or a large campus, a sounder tells everybody something is wrong and leaves them to work out what; a voice system tells one zone to leave by the north stairs while the rest are told to stand by. For phased evacuation in a tall building, that is the whole mechanism.
Intelligibility is what a PA system is judged on and it is the thing most often got wrong. A room with hard surfaces and a long reverberation time will happily be loud and completely unintelligible. Speaker type, spacing, tap-off power and aiming are designed against the space, and more, quieter speakers close to people almost always beat a few loud ones — which is why we set the layout out per area rather than covering a floor plate at a uniform spacing.
Where the system carries evacuation messages it stops being an audio installation and becomes part of the life safety system: monitored speaker lines, standby power, a fireman’s microphone at the panel, and message priority so an evacuation announcement overrides the background music and the paging. We design, install and commission it with sound level and intelligibility measured per zone, and hand over those measurements with the zone plan.
What the installation is built from
Amplification, zoning, speakers chosen per space — and, where it carries evacuation messages, the supervision and standby power that go with that duty.
Tell us about the project
Send the drawings or the BOQ and we will price it line by line. Most enquiries start with a site visit, because the site decides the system — not the catalogue.