Wait! That's my car!
Wait, what am I doing?
Whether it's calling my order number, my court reservation, or my license plate number,
I can never understand what they're saying over the PA system.
Surely in a world where headphones can be wireless and we can cancel out background noise on a zoom call like magic,
it can't be that hard to build a building speaker setup that's actually clear.
Oh, yes, it can. But we can do it, right? I mean, of course.
But first we have to segue. To our sponsor.
When we first checked out this space, the echo in here was absolutely mind-blowing.
But as you can hear, it's quite a lot better now.
We've talked before about how we've sound-treated our studio, our lab,
and even our workshop to keep reverb and other unpleasantness out of our recordings.
And we started with a pretty similar approach here at our Badminton Gym Slash Land Gaming Center,
which, by the way, huge update! We heard back from the city we're actually going to be able to do whale land! Let's go!
Starting with the ceilings, we switched away from our usual cellulose-based spray on foam
and went with a fiberglass spray on acoustic treatment.
It does still add a little bit of insulation, which is always a good thing,
but the most important factors were the fact that it goes on a little thinner.
It's a little easier to paint, so we didn't end up with that ugly color from the lab again.
And, maybe most importantly, it is less susceptible to damage and mold in the event that moisture seeps into it.
This stuff is great because its porosity and uneven surface act to absorb and scatter any incoming sound waves,
significantly reducing reflections between the floor and the ceiling.
But, unfortunately, we couldn't spray that material all the way down the walls
and expect it to hold up to flying birdies, bags, and bodies,
or even just people getting bored and picking the foam off the walls while they wait for their next match.
Fortunately, the solution was right under our noses, or rather our backs.
We already had our eye on these gym mats to provide a sturdy but comfortable backrest
for folks who are sitting on our customized, storage-friendly benches.
And as it turns out, they do a pretty solid job of attenuating many of the problem frequencies
that like to bounce around forever in a space like this.
So, two birdies, one stone, and all of that.
The multi-layer sprung floor and foam and vinyl topper that we installed
also contribute to echo reduction, but not as much as the other factors.
To demonstrate how effective this ended up being, instead of using my lab microphone,
we're going to switch over to the iPhone 16 Plus that Jordan's holding over there.
Back when we started, you wouldn't have been able to make out a bloody word that I was saying from back here.
But now, it's downright usable. Not great, but usable.
We're starting off in a much better place, but before we can start blasting amplified sound
into our big concrete cavern, we need to make some careful considerations
to make sure that every visitor can hear about the limited-time offer on left-handed badminton rackets
while also keeping the system intuitive and customizable for staff.
Now, there's a lot of options out there, but for a variety of reasons,
a lot of them won't work for us. For starters, there's the traditional PA.
These are affordable, super easy to set up.
I mean, all you need is a hammer microphone, a cable, a mixer,
and it doesn't need to be a fancy one like this, and a powered speaker.
And boom, you're off to the races. In fact, it's pretty intelligible all the way from this end of the facility to the other.
The only problem is, in order to make it so that Jordan can hear what Dan's saying,
go ahead, Dan. Hey, Jordan, how you doing?
You're basically blasting my ears off.
It's not balanced. Can you hear this okay, Jordan?
Yes. Yes, we can hear you. I mean, I think Jordan can barely hear this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Dan. Obviously, we could relocate this entire setup pretty easily for better balance,
or we could wire up the entire facility with audio cable
and have it all come back to a central location, but that's going to cost us some flexibility,
because the best place for, let's say, a tournament draw desk
or for a land knock are not necessarily going to be the same places.
We needed more flexibility. Another option was a constant voltage system.
They're commonly 70 volts in North America and 100 volts in Europe,
but the voltage isn't important. What's important is you have a bunch of in-ceiling speakers that'll look kind of like this
and they'll run background music, the occasional announcement, that sort of thing.
This is typically what you'll find in doctor's offices, classrooms, restaurants, and the like.
These systems can cover long distances with very thin, inexpensive wire,
thanks to their high voltage, but are not known to have great sound quality,
certainly not worthy of crab rave. And besides, what is this, the Stone Age?
Why wouldn't we use Ethernet? With Ethernet, we can have high-fidelity audio.
We don't have to run snakes and low-voltage audio cables.
We can just use standard network cabling,
and that means we can put speakers all over the place,
keeping each individual speaker relatively quiet, improving clarity.
Also, theoretically, because it's Ethernet,
we can use switching to kind of tap into it from anywhere
and have modularity and configurability,
so you can address one side of the building, the other side of the building, or the whole freaking building.
There's only one small problem. Everyone and their dog has their own platform and protocols
that are various degrees of proprietary.
What we thought, until then, found Dante,
which is built on previous AOE and AOIP tech.
Some of the key benefits of Dante are it's an uncompressed high-quality audio.
It's easy to install and expand. It scales really well.
It's got wide manufacturer support. There's about 350 companies that are licensed right now,
and typically it's only supported by higher-end audio gear.
Ah, I knew there was going to be a catch. Yeah, you pay the Dante tax.
But Dante Controller lets you configure the routing,
so you wanted modularity and ease of use.
Yeah, ease of use was pretty big. We want it to be something that any random staffer can use.
I don't want to be here when there's a little problem
or to change the levels or anything like that. Especially because it could be at a LAN at three in the morning.
Exactly. Can we configure it for like one-button presets?
I'll show you what I've done. Good, Lord, I thought you said this was simple.
We ended up going with Q-Sys mostly because of the end of it is simple,
but setting it up in the configuration is what makes it complicated.
I've always said you need complexity to make things simple.
To get the one-button and to get it easy for staff and to get it configurable,
we have to have this mess of nodes and flows and things like that,
especially as we've got loads of endpoints. We have about 30 speakers, we have wireless microphones,
and maybe we do want to do a traditional PA when we do LANs.
Cool, but theoretically it works?
It does. It's in production right now. They've been using it for the afternoon badminton sessions.
Okay. Oh, wow. So it's working then?
Yes. Both mics work at the same time.
Maybe a little loud here. Wow, that's cool. And I've made it so that the volume of the mics is adjustable.
So it balances the level. So it keeps everything consistent.
So Linus can scream and nervous LAN participants who have just won something
and get to talk to their idol. It's all a very consistent level.
Show me how we can cordon off a section and turn it off.
Right here I've got these volume ramps. And so by toggling off, you know, the courts or the bathrooms or something like that,
it'll take a section of speakers and dim them down to nothing or bring them back up.
And the other thing is I didn't want a traditional mute button
because say you're playing music in the background, you unmute it,
the whole courts get blasted. So it's even got a ramp uptime as well.
So when you unmute it, it comes up nice and softly and slowly
and then ramps up to where it needs to be. It's great.
Okay. In the long term, could we have like a little, I don't know, a stream deck or something
where you could like toggle on different sections of the building?
Exactly. Right now I have it set for the courts to be toggleable
and we could eventually do that for any zone that we want.
Jim, the lounge upstairs, everything like that.
Eventually what we'll have is a little iPad that they can carry around
and pick what zones they want or if they want to switch over to LAN mode,
it'll kind of be a button and that'll adjust a whole bunch of things.
But as it stands right now, I just have a very basic interface.
Oh yeah, basic. Yeah, no, this is not like the user interface.
This is the user interface that I've made right now.
I didn't spend a lot of time on it. And as you can see, it's only like three buttons.
So we can toggle if the court is enabled.
And then we can also limit the volume of the background music.
When you're playing badminton and things like that, it can be a nice background level.
And then we have background music death,
which basically takes the entire courts up to their maximum volume
that I think is a pretty damn loud.
Can we hear it? Sure, let's do it. You want some crab rave?
Yeah, let's do it. While Dan's getting them going, now's as good a time as any
to show you the speakers that we ended up using. They're from SoundTube and they are power over Ethernet,
meaning that all we need to have is a PoE switch.
And boom, you can have an amplified speaker anywhere you can run an Ethernet cable.
So on this side of the court, we've actually got, I think it's nine of them.
Go ahead, Dan. Realistically, we'd love to add a little bit more acoustic dampening
to the ends of the building. And there are still some things that Dan can tune within the software
to help compensate for the echoeyness of the space.
But you can see as I move around, this is actually pretty usable.
Crank it up, Dan. Let's go.
You can definitely tell when you're closer to one of the speakers.
But there's so many that you're pretty much always close to one.
Another thing that I've implemented as well is automatic ducking.
So I can talk into the microphone and do my announcements,
and then when I stop...
Hey! Now that's pretty cool.
It's also time-bound as well, so it's not down and up and down and up.
Freaking loud. Like, what the heck?
To kind of prevent it from getting super loud. Yeah.
You know, I hook up my phone. I set it to 100% volume.
It doesn't destroy the whole speakers and everything like that.
I've got a leveling system for the phone input as well.
So if you're playing it super quiet out in the lobby,
it's all going to be a consistent volume. Wait, we can just like connect our phone to it?
I have it Bluetooth to my laptop right now. The adapter I have is Bluetooth.
These are sure beta-58 wireless mics,
and the thing is that they're... the receiver's stuffed under a door in the kind of court area right at the front.
They reach all the way to the back on both courts, and you don't have to think about it.
Then when we come in to do LANs, we can be on site,
we can do more weird things. This is just the most basic setup.
Super easy to do. Thanks Q-Sys, I guess.
Oh, did they hook us up with software? No, it's just...
No, it's perpetual licenses. We did have to pay for a whole bunch of licenses,
like a Dante channel upgrade. Right now, I think we have 16 transmit flows.
So I have 16 zones, including both bathrooms,
and each side of the speakers are on different zones.
We've got four along the left, four along the right, four for the hanging speakers,
and then court concession in both bathrooms. So is this the kind of installation that Dante is for?
Well, typically, you use Dante to bring audio back and forth
between the stage, the mixer, position, and speakers,
but in this setup, we're doing things a little bit different. There's no mixer at all.
Right, because we're using Q-Sys. Exactly. So Q-Sys is a network-manageable audio-video and control program.
Right, so we just don't need a mixer. Exactly. It does it all in the box.
Tell me this, though. Does Dante have any special requirements from your network equipment?
Like, can I just plug it into anything? Yeah, not from the switching side.
It does have extremely specific, like, transmit protocols
that need to be followed, often requiring an entire separate network to be run
so that it doesn't go over your normal local traffic.
Is it a latency issue? Latency issue and a traffic issue as well.
You need very specific packet switching. Okay, but our Unify stuff does it?
It does now, up until extremely recently,
Unify was one of the only companies that you could not use Dante with.
Oh, and yet? And yet. They have released some Alpha version right now
which supports Q-Sys, Dante, Crestron,
all of those sort of switching protocols. And you can actually see our RGB switches here.
The ones in this greeny yellow are a specific Dante VLAN that we have set up.
RGB network switches. Who knew it would actually be very practical?
It's actually quite useful. So this is a completely separate VLAN
which basically carries all of our audio traffic.
Theoretically, all we need to do to plug one of these guys in
is just slap it in here to any PoE port
and then it'll activate and if it's on the right VLAN
then now you've got two analog inputs.
Yep, there you go. Wow. So that's actually a camera.
So it's not gonna work. I am watching you.
Stop it. These dongles. I couldn't help noticing we have a lot of them we're not using right now.
What is the plan for these? These are all for the LAN eventually.
For example, this is one that we're using downstairs for the microphone.
So this is a stereo XLR in. This one here is a stereo XLR out.
So we could have a traditional backline on a stage or something like that
and then feed the entire system directly into some big speakers.
The nice thing about Dante in particular in these
is I can preconfigure them in whatever port I want
and then all I do is I plug them into the network and they self-assemble.
That is so cool. They're all addressed and they have controls on them too.
So when Chase is just rolling out LAN equipment
all he needs to know is this goes there
and boom, it's ready to go. Exactly.
Super sick. This one here is USB-C.
Oh, so it's blue. It goes in and out. It's two-way communication.
So this is, I believe, a dual stereo pair.
The one that we have downstairs is Bluetooth and there's a whole bunch of different ins and outs
because Dante is kind of just a standard
and then companies can put it in whatever they want.
It's pretty neat. How much did it cost?
So this entire setup with all of these adapters
and about 30 speakers was about 20 grand, I believe.
That is great. Guys, you have no idea the kinds of quotes
that I got from like audio contractors and obviously we spent more than $20,000 total
when we consider the time that our infrastructure team
and Dan spent implementing this.
I think we're still out ahead, though. Absolutely.
And all we had to do was run Ethernet cable and the adaptability pays for itself.
Yeah. It can be changed anytime we want.
It can be in any port in this building. That is so cool.
You just need PoE. Like we could add a PA to the office up here.
All we'd have to do is make sure that that port is running to a PoE switch and then boom.
And this one is. So now we have a microphone in Jim's office.
It's as easy as that. It's so cool. I know.
I mean, we may have to switch a VLAN around, but that's mostly for security, right?
That's really cool. Like this cool segue to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the last time
that Dan and the team and I were frantically working on this place.
But hey, it's almost done, right? It feels so together, right?
Like look at this. We got like access control and all the doors and everything.
Does that work yet? Yes. Everything's in.