Anyone here installed one of these recently? Vaguely remember cheeseweasel mentioning this, but last one I did was at high school work experience in 1988…

I’m going to be designing two systems planned at the retirement homes – 1 x 20 speakers for a 3 floor building, and a smaller one with maybe 8-10 speakers for a 2 floor building. Got 2 other staff helping with the wiring (the older guys, the young lads are frightened of the ladders, electric or to dirty their clothes, and struggle to deal with anything over 10kg – and this is in a country area too! I blame hipsters and their culture…

LS will be “music quality” ,ceiling mount in the bigger home (as it has one of those false ceilings and loads of cable trays etc) and wall mount for the older place (the service risers / trunking is made out of hardboard and contains all manner of pipes and cables in 1970s design).

Some will have individual or group attenuators Sources will be background music (probably from a streaming audio player, which is most likely going to be fed from Radio Caroline as their presenters are now around the same age group as our patients). There will be the usual gooseneck desk mic with PTT switch. I did think of wiring in a telephone interface but this is for use by relatively non technical staff who use DECT handsets, where they can easily stand in the path of a speaker and it and howl the lot
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I’m looking at getting a TOA amp for each site, 120W for the smaller one and 240W for the bigger one. The other brands are way too expensive but I’m wary of the cheap ones and they aren’t going in the comms racks anyway as those are near full capacity – I remember when the new place opened in 2011 and one of the directors was amazed at how “big” the 42RU rack unit was (it is taller than both of us, and I have to stand on a cable reel to get at the patch panels for some areas). I said to him “give it 2 years and it will be full, and we might need another rack in there). We are now down to 6RU if that (as Openreach stole a bit in the bottom – I even had to buy the shelf as all those NTE5s were dumped inside the rack loose on the end of the wires :rant:

Since this picture was taken most of the space above is occupied (including a server) so and an amp at the bottom is just asking for overheating problems in summer. In that building there is a whole separate comms room so the amp can go in the corner where the CCTV DVR sits – the other one will probably end up in my office (to stop people monkeying around with the volumes etc).

Will 120W and 240W be enough for these buildings, or should I go even higher?