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Installation Europe

August 2008

IP Enters PA Arena

The IP network seems to be the inevitable destination for both intercoms and paging systems, writes Joy Zaccaria. However, convincing businesses to implement such technology may take time.

For a simpler, cheaper and less disruptive installation, running audio over existing networks and cabling makes sense. However, IP-based systems currently have some hurdles to overcome, both technologically and in terms of their perception in the market.

While the R&D challenges of getting products to work are within the control of audio manufacturers, the challenge of changing a client’s perception and business structure can take more diplomacy. If a huge multinational corporation is looking to install or refurbish, then budgets must be juggled and combined in order to maximise the cost-efficiency of combining various audio communication systems and running them over IP in a network-centric construct.

Riedel Artist 1000 series intercom control panel used by the presentation manager in the LTU Arena in Düsseldorf, Germany Clear-Com’s Eclipse Digital Matrix has been installed in the control room of German broadcast company TVN Group

There is plenty of opportunity to demonstrate these new IP audio systems in Europe’s healthy market. European audio companies are installing at home and pursuing the hot and growing markets of eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Paging and intercom systems are two different animals, but their IP lines follow similar audio tech paths. Running paging and intercoms over IP lines can be paralleled to a few other IP technologies in recent history, such as voice over IP and IP-based video surveillance cameras.

Jake Dodson, Clear-Com’s UK-based vice president of product management, relates the perception of IP solutions in this industry to what the telecoms industry went through. “Voice over IP had a bad rap,” he says. “The technology first brought to market wasn’t up to standard.”

Johannes G Rietschel, chief executive and founder of Zurich-based Barix, compares audio intercoms and paging to their video counterpart. “IP-based video surveillance systems have only 20 - 30% market share, but it’s rapidly growing,” he says. “People figure out it’s not more expensive and they get all the benefits of using traditional infrastructure. We ride on this wave.”

While IP is the way of the future, it’s not right for all applications at this time. For communications between different cities, IP is the cost-effective solution. Andreas Hilmer, responsible for marketing and communications at Riedel, believes that since IP usually has some delays, “an IP-based system would not be chosen to execute a theatrical show, for example, where it is all about real-time communications.”

However, he adds: “IP in general will definitely improve and become more and more important. What people expect from it is a reduction in price.”

Dodson believes in a hybrid world for intercom systems. New technologies from Clear-Com feature a hybrid of IP-based technology and classic time domain multiplexing (TDM). “We’ve had products on the market for two and a half years now on the IP side,” says Dodson. “Clear-Com is offering new ways of communicating based on a proven communications infrastructure with TDM matrixes that have IP connections for remote users.”

Clear-Com has just launched a communications product called Concert that works entirely on an IT network-based infrastructure. Instead of having a comms hardware panel at a desk, a Concert client runs on a PC or laptop that goes back to a central IT server. “In the future we see that kind of environment linking across into the standard TDM comms,” says Dodson. “I would not suggest an all-IP world for many years. There are lots of infrastructure investments still to be made globally. IP is on a definite upward trajectory, but doing it well is a whole different game.”

Nico Lewis, sales manager Western Europe for critical communications systems (CCS) at Telex, handles intercom work mainly for broadcast applications. “We see a lot of growth at the moment in global communication,” he says. “We developed an IP-based communication interface called RVON (RTS Voice over Network). Within this IP-based system, we can connect the world with each other. When we started, everyone was sceptical. Now broadcast trucks communicate with transmission towers over IP to be flexible so that regional studio centres can communicate over IP to save telephone costs.”

‘IP is on a definite upward trajectory, but doing it well is whole different game’ Jake Dodson, Clear-Com

CCS Telex/RTS uses intelligent trunking to connect different islands to each other. “In this way our customers can build a system with up to 31 different matrices of any type,” says Lewis. “Every single matrix of that system can be an 8x8 matrix up to a 1,000 x 1,000 port matrix system.”

For permanent installations, Barix products have been used for intercoms at the Euro 2008 football championships, but sports venues are not a major focus for the company at this point. “In a stadium you need low latency systems for intercom,” says Rietschel. “At least in people’s minds, that is not IP, it’s CobraNet or Ethersound. This perception is changing.”

Rietschel believes that more people are understanding that IP can also deliver low latency. For many applications, IP is suitable and much easier to use than proprietary systems such as CobraNet. “Five years ago everyone thought it would be impossible to run life safety/evacuation systems over IP,” he says. “For over a year there has been a system on the market from one of our OEMs that is a full life safety evacuation system based on our IP technology. It is being used where people traditionally used other systems in order to achieve redundancy.”

Eric Bevillard is product manager for PYKO at Digigram, a company that offers a ‘computer/network audio’ approach for its communications systems. Eight years ago, Digigram proposed a disruptive approach with the Audio Manager software controlling NCX devices, which were using Ethernet streaming. But there were some remaining important limitations that pushed Digigram to develop a new generation over IP: the PYKO, with heavily redesigned Audio Manager software. PYKO is designed for long distances since it is flexible thanks to the IP, and is often a cheap solution because the network is already installed.

The good market
Many in the industry are surprised that the market in Europe is as strong as it is. The year started with talk of gloom and doom and recession. But market and technological factors have trumped that attitude with the focus on high definition for the past three or four years. A lot of HD installations have been either budgeted for or completed. With the new equipment required for HD, it’s not a big jump to realise new intercoms are necessary.

‘Stadiums need low latency for intercoms. People think that is not IP, but this is changing’
Johannes G Rietschel, Barix

In the broadcast market, the Middle East is growing rapidly – having doubled turnover in the past couple of months. Eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria and Poland, is also doing well due to big investments this year and last year as conversions to fully high def were undertaken. “New markets are up and coming, such as Ukraine and Serbia,” says Telex’s Lewis. “The Russian market is doing well preparing for the 2014 Winter Olympics. That’s a big market for us.”

ic audio is seeing solid growth in Germany and other European markets. However, Sascha Riedling, sales and marketing director at the PA manufacturer, says “it’s nothing compared to the fast-growing markets in the Middle East and in Asia”. He adds: “In Europe, the fastest growing markets are in eastern Europe: Poland, Romania and, for the future, Bulgaria are the key countries for massive growth.”

Convincing the client
In order for the market to remain strong, a key factor will be convincing a client with a variety of factions to accept this new concept of IP and reallocate their budgets to work together, as opposed to having a separate budget for different audio systems. “The corporate and enterprise sector is growing, but not in a classic way,” says Clear-Com’s Dodson. “There are more situations where what IP provides overlaps nicely with the communications needs in a modern international business: good quality audio, multiple people in remote locations, IT-centric infrastructures. For our new IP technologies, there are a lot of synergies in those markets.”

Clear-Com sees its role as introducing the highest-quality audio communication technologies within global companies. “The key to the value we offer is not just a variety of technologies but linking various technologies together in a unified manner. Then customers can start driving through efficiencies in their businesses and drive down costs,” says Dodson.

Similarly, there is some convincing to do in the paging world. Graeme Harrison, vice president, international sales at Biamp, says that for his company, the future is a facility-wide system.

For a recent project at a campus-wide military installation, Biamp was presented with two separate liaisons: one person for conference rooms and videoconferencing, and another in charge of the paging system. “They wanted to link via fibre a number of buildings on the campus,” says Harrison. “Half an hour into the meeting, I said: ‘You do realise this could be one system!’” The idea of buying just one system with one point of control, one network that did everything, turned out to be very appealing.

Achieving unity
Biamp has realised that complications may come from a client that has different budgets from different departments. Similarly, in a sports stadium, the paging system is also the sound system in the corporate boxes and the meeting room system and the boardroom system. “But the client has different budgets for each,” says Harrison. “The different departments need to talk to each other and to agree on a unified approach. It’s a trend people will take a while to get used to. But it’s what’s going to happen. It makes no sense to have separate systems; just like it makes no sense to have one computer to do spreadsheets and another to do word processing.”

Heightened security requirements in stadiums and other public places are driving the market for paging systems. EN6849 and its derivatives, which are becoming more widely adopted in Europe, require that public spaces with more than 100 people have life safety, evacuation and paging systems. “That’s meant the life safety/evacuation/paging market is increasing in Europe,” says Biamp’s Harrison.

Biamp’s equipment is all TCP-IP addressable and sits on a network. “We’re able to run both audio and control over existing networks and cabling,” adds Harrison. The company has extended that concept to its paging microphones. Biamp introduced a
network paging station last autumn called NPS1, which communicates with the rest of the system with one Cat-5 cable that carries power over Ethernet, along with data and audio.

Needs vary
A variety of systems can be formulated to suit customer requirements. There is a continuum from a high-quality loudspeaker entertainment system that does some paging in a sports centre, through to a voice system in rapid transit applications.

A sports venue is very output intensive. “They might have only one or two paging mics but they might have 50 or 100 different zones,” says Biamp’s Harrison. “An airport would have a lot of microphones – one for each gate – and probably a similar number of out-puts as the sports venue.”

Defining priorities is crucial in a system with a lot of microphones. “The more complex the inputs, the more flexible your system has to be in terms of how you police and arbitrate for the different people in the systems who want to do different things at the same time,” says Harrison.

‘The fastest growing markets are in eastern Europe: Poland, Romania and, for the future, Bulgaria’
Sascha Riedling, ic audio

An airport would be more functionality-driven than a sports arena, for example, because it is more complex in terms of priorities for paging. An airport system may use store and forward functionality, where the page is held until all the output zones are available for use.

Something new for airports recently is the importance of archiving. “If something goes wrong, they can listen to pages and make sure everyone did what they were supposed to do in terms of evacuating people,” says Harrison.

Needs also vary according to the size of the project; in many small projects, basic paging solutions without surveillance are requested. “In this case the product should be very price competitive and easy to handle,” says ic audio’s Riedling.

In mid-sized installations, surveillance and ‘zone power’ are the key topics. Riedling observes that customers want a product that is small to save rack space (and cost), along with the opportunity to add up to maybe 80 speaker zones.

For large projects, for example in airports, the main concern is to have a fully integrated network solution. The systems have to communicate with other installed systems. Furthermore the highest security levels have to be reached. “So for the big one, it’s maximum life safety combined with a fully integrated network-based solution,” says Riedling.

With the consolidation of companies in many industries, the need for intercom and paging communications between a multitude of sites and venues will become more important. IP technology, the common denominator for communication and data transfer, is improving and becoming seamless for the user. Just as data and matrices are becoming united, progress is also being made on the business side to unite the budgets required to pay for this technology.

www.barix.com
www.biamp.com
www.clearcom.com
www.digigram.com
www.ic-audio.com
www.inroi.ch
www.riedel.net
www.rtsintercoms.com
www.telex.net
www.titlis.ch

Case study: Clear-Com hits a high note at Norway’s National Opera

NORWAY’S NEWEST and most prestigious opera house, Nytt Operahus, is in full swing, buzzing with a whole spectrum of opera programmes. To ensure that its busy operation runs smoothly, the Opera House is relying on Eclipse Omega matrix intercom and FreeSpeak50 digital wireless systems from Clear-Com Communication Systems.

The Oslo-based opera house employs 600 people, including a production and sound crew, all of whom will be utilising Clear-Com’s FreeSpeak50 wireless beltpack for point-to-point connectivity. The system provides communication throughout the building, which houses 1,100 rooms along with a 1,350-seat performance auditorium and a small 400-seat auditorium.

The Clear-Com system includes a 64-port Eclipse Omega Digital Matrix frame connected to the FreeSpeak50 digital wireless intercom system via two E-Que cards. A cellular network of 20 active antennae enables the 40 FreeSpeak50 beltpacks to maintain a constant connection to the communication hub while the users roam throughout the facility.

The Eclipse Omega Digital Matrix intercom platform is the most powerful unit in the Clear-Com Eclipse range. It offers the highest port density of any system, making it ideal for large multiple auditorium venues. As a digital wireless system integrated with a digital intercom matrix, FreeSpeak50 is flexible and scalable so it can work in complex locations where line-of-sight communications are not practical. Its beltpack is intelligent and programmable with a high level of functionality, yet still lightweight enough to wear with a 12-hour battery life.

Case study: audio distribution and paging in the mountains

BERGBAHNEN ENGELBERG-TRUEBSEE-TITLIS, commonly known as Titlis Rotair, is a popular ski resort in the Swiss Alps. The resort recently installed an innovative paging and background music delivery system using technology from Swiss company Barix.

Barix ICGraph software provides a bird’s eye view of the entire network. Every output station is graphically displayed.

The installation, based on the TCP/IP standard, uses the resort’s existing network infrastructure for access control and video surveillance. The Barix solution, using a mix of Instreamer encoders, Exstreamer decoders and Annuncicom IP intercom devices, distributes CD-quality background music channels to ski lift sites, restaurants and general outpost stations throughout the resort.

Barix ICGraph software is installed at the central paging station at the base of the ski area. This provides the operator with a bird’s eye view of the entire network, with the ability to select an individual station or group of stations to transmit a live page or announcement using an Annuncicom 100. The status of every output station is graphically displayed, with current background channel music also configurable from the central station. The Instreamers encode the music for network-wide distribution to all or selected stations.

Barix Exstreamer 200 devices featuring built-in amplifiers are used in tandem with Annuncicoms at the ski lifts and restaurants to decode music and voice. The Annuncicom activates a relay when a page is made to a specific zone, enabling the legacy PA amplifier for widespread announcements. Certain stations connect a paging microphone to the Annuncicom to make ‘regional’ announcements. The Annuncicoms serve as a local paging master, allowing the messages to be heard within the station and on other receiving devices.

Philipp Ineichen, CEO of Swiss systems integrator Inroi, worked closely with Titlis Rotair to define and install the solution. According to Ineichen, the low-cost of the Barix devices and its full IP conformance to the existing network made Barix the ideal choice.

“With an average cost of €400 per location and CD-quality background music and paging, the Barix solution is ideal for mixed paging, music distribution and intercom solutions,” says Ineichen.

Although the main portion of the system is now active, the full deployment is scheduled for completion prior to the opening of the 2008-09 ski season.

Joy Zaccaria is a freelance writer in New York City.