The audio system in our badminton club slash gaming center was built with blood,
sweat and tears. Well hopefully not blood. Oh god so much blood.
He's not wrong though and the worst part is all the blood was for absolutely nothing!
What? You know this! See it turns out that all of our wall mounted speakers are defective
and after waiting four months for replacement hey Dan what's that? Our asset tag.
The ones that were on the exact speakers that were sent back to the vendor unrepaird.
Adding insult to injury when Q-SYS the manufacturer that's behind the brain of our sound system
saw our last video they were compelled to get on a plane and come all the way out here to say
paging Linus good first attempt but I think we can do better together thank you legitimately thank
In fairness to us this is a very challenging environment see in a big box like this
the sound waves are just begging to bounce around and if you need to issue important announcements
people need to be able to understand them and understanding is only going to get harder
when we fill this place up with 250 plus gamers for all nighter land sessions
But good news everyone because thanks to the power of Dave we've done it this bad boy right
here handles everything from paging to background to even being able to handle audio for our stage
Oh and let's get a message from our sponsor while a PA system might not seem that complex
or exciting it's worth considering that this facility is not just one big box but rather it
is several big boxes we have two sets of quartz a lounge a pro shop a cafeteria a gym and then two
separate washrooms all of which need to be able to be individually addressed or addressed as groups
and in a manner that is not confusing for our front desk staff we want anyone who works here
to be able to confidently use this system so with over 30 speakers and seven zones not to mention
two businesses that literally only I would ever think to put in the same building keeping things
simple has a lot of backend complexity this is the solution that Dan cooked up using Q-SYS designer
it's well kind of terrifying that is where Dave from Q-SYS comes in you know it's not bad considering
yourself Todd I'm impressed you got something functional but we could do better yeah thanks
to Q-SYS training I was able to kind of get acquainted with the system and learn everything
that I needed to to get this up immediately and we have been using it which is like a testament to Dan
this is a real interface it has buttons and everything but let's look at what decades of
experience could do to refine it up in our top corners where we have all of our inputs come into
the system and we decide to monitor everything as it's coming in with live audio meter so we can
see what's going on right how much signal we got in where we want to distribute it and that's the
same as I have here right right this is your this is your Dante input it totally looks the same
well it was a yellow block shut up it actually copied your block to start over see I did a good
he got me started yeah this here is where any of the Dante audio streams come into the system
however rather than do spaghetti wiring all throughout we would just assign them with
tagged names that can go anywhere we need to within the sound system and they're all color
coded so we can follow along cool okay so that means that my usb-c in one is right here yeah
exactly super cool what are we looking at in the purple zone down in our purple zone here this is
where we're doing our music processing where we can switch between having music be more background
or being more in your face death by music got it we've created two separate streams of background
music if we have a LAN event on one side and badminton on the other side we can have two
different background paths that will go serve the necessary areas got it oh hey look I can read labels
so the next one is microphones exactly these are microphones that the staff can take out onto
the court and they're able to just make an announcement this comes up a lot especially
during our competitive ladder events and tournaments when things are a fair bit more busy than they are
right now and the coolest part is you're not going to get any feedback because we've processed the
audio directly for each microphone including a dynamic notch feedback controller at the end
of the chain that will constantly monitor for standing wave patterns and make sure that we
curve them out of the audio spectrum that is so cool and so theoretically if people like
saw your layout here could they like do something like this absolutely so can you click on a
notch feedback controller like what did you configure in the oh god okay so as long as
they're also a wizard and they see your layout here then they could do all of this this actually
is going to monitor for itself it has dynamic filters that will apply to solve a problem and
then after 30 seconds it will go away because that microphone is going to move around the court
and be in a different spot every time first in first out it's a cue not that I don't believe
him but here let's give it a shot wow that's actually pretty cool I am getting no feedback
whatsoever no matter where I move in the court and hey harry how's it sound
nice what if I wasn't yelling can you can you still hear me okay if I'm just talking into the
mic heck yeah oh it doesn't blow out people's ears either you've probably got some cool gating
stuff on it and stuff we got some stuff he's got all this stuff guys like gate keep girl boss
I'm so psyched because like whenever I have to take attendance and stuff for ladder night I'm
always like yelling at everybody this is going to be great now I can yell at people with amplification
check this out lady this is our new interface is it actually as simple as it looks I don't know
let's see hello that's awesome yeah and you can do background music and stuff too
oh that's good can you connect to your phone to play the background music can connect to
basically anything on the face of the earth oh wow but let's show let's let's talk about the music
now Dan's implementation for background music was pretty cool it had what he calls automatic
ducking so when you start talking you don't have to compete with the background music it'll it'll
come down can you do that oh we did that and we did more sorry Dan Dan is using one of those
super cool little bluetooth Dante adapters Dante is an incredible ecosystem man you can plug freaking
anything into it and out of it so whether it's like bluetooth or xlr in or a three and a half
millimeter jack you just need one of these little PoE adapters so he's playing bluetooth audio off
of his phone over at the reception and then we're going to try out the ducking when I try to
and dude this is going to be great for lans because we've got the ability to out of moments notice
you like shut up the tournaments now everybody pay attention and it's freaking loud even when
in front of the speaker we get no feedback is that awesome or what another cool thing is when
we're in background music mode we're not just adjusting the volume of the music right we're
actually processing it differently and pulling out some of the frequencies from the music which
is where our human conversation tends to live right so it's easier to just talk over it and
tune it out so you can actually bring more music into the area without making people have to scream
to understand each other it's the same way you hear different instruments in the orchestra
or how you hear different parts of a musical when they're singing in harmony with each other
you can have more things going on and still understand them but wait there's more I assume
I don't actually know that for sure is there more there's always more now is the part where
we talk about zone management and we actually get this thing hooked up because as I was walking
over here one of the smash champs staff came up to me and was like hey so is it working we haven't
been able to use the mic all day we really need it which shows you again Dan shout out Dan how
important it was the stuff that Dan did and not worthless one of the other neat things is we just
had this plugged in the court now it's plugged in here it'll reassign itself you can plug it in
anywhere oh dude that is so cool isn't that neat yes because all of these have internal IDs and so
any port anywhere including on whale land we can put anything in this building and we could put a
speaker we could put a microphone we could put the bluetooth adapter do we have more than one of those
as many as you want would they would they like sync the settings or no they would just address
whoever they're set to address oh how much he gets it uh oh damn I knew there was a catch
it starts with four digits but they're metal and they're PoE dude that's so cool I kind of
teased this before but here's the zones 101 and 102 means the two different sides of the badminton
hall then we've got the pro shop concession washrooms lounge and fitness area we've also
got some super convenient grouping buttons that make it really quick to page the entire facility or
just the common areas and not the courts for instance system setup is only really needed
when we're running LAN events and we want to switch out of all badminton mode and finally
scheduling announcements is going to be really nice for the staff here because as it is now
they have to have notifications on their phones for okay it's five minutes till the end of the
session hey everyone it's five minutes till the end of session blah blah blah they have to do that
manually every time well now we can just have little pre-recorded messages that we can play and
say hey get off it's five minutes from the end since we're getting set up can you kill the chime
and we'll just have it go instantly we can do that okay should replace it with like a klaxon
no no no discord notifications oh what if it's like the iphone
okay no no and no but in all seriousness now that this is set up is there any reason that someone
like Dan with just a little bit of experience couldn't go in and just make little changes like that
it's super easy to just drop in an audio file of whatever chime you want to have select that from
absolutely my understanding is you could build an interface specifically for that say you know
they're doing their hourly reminders we could just change those out as a simplified version for the
staff we can build those in as an automated macro command and we can trigger those off of
time-based events easily every networking people get excited about networking is actually pretty cool
what if it would if it said hey little thing let me let you get up oh la come on i have a
lesson my dad's ever now please move to the other court yeah networking's fun yeah while we were
waiting i wanted to check out this cool interface thing and Dan was explaining it to me and then
he broke it classic Dan okay yeah so what is this these are the little unify like vision
portly things that allow you to just PoE HDMI out and then you can send a security camera feed and
build your own little like uh views and then you can have them rotate through like you can see some
of them doing that looks what's it called these are the unified viewports now one of the things
i thought was really cool was that you've got this themed for our colors so it doesn't look like that
in there no if i just copy the controls over onto the user interface yeah this is what they look like
to start it's all just kind of gray and white and very small font and stuff however with q-sis we
can actually use css just like web designers would to create a style sheet for the entire user
interface so i built you a little css and if we go when we were to apply it to our to our touch
panel over here we add our line is smash jams haza theoretically everything is live theoretically
yes check check in the pro shop oh wow that is uh okay i asked him to juice it a little bit
he did do that hey roge if you guys want a deeper look at the hardware side of all the networking
that this is running on then i recommend checking out this video here in a nutshell it's pretty much
all ubiquity which when we installed it did not have proper support for daunte and q-sis but now
thanks to the power of ubiquity being genuinely kind of bros it all works and it's out of beta now
okay pro shop and concession are now working and they sound good they sound good okay should we be
testing the courts with everybody out there ah screw it paging all smash jams patrons we have
updated our audio system to be louder and easier to understand that is all
terrific that's actually way more attention than they usually pay to the announcements people
get pretty focused on their games but on the subject of being focused on your gaming how's
it going to handle the lan event thanks again to q-sis for helping us get the audio set up for this
event now i guess the only thing that remains is this segue you guys are great if you guys
enjoyed this video maybe go check out the previous one where we showed all of the physical aspects
of the networking both for the badminton club and for our lands shout out Dan and the info team
for getting all of the bones laid for all of this and shout out david for coming out and getting
this all set up q-sis has some amazing products and services we're gonna have them linked down below