The audio system in our badminton club/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 4
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 unrepaired. Adding insult to
injury, when CUCIs, 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 Lionus, good first attempt, but I think we can do better together."
>> Thank you. Legitimately, [snorts] thank you. 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.
>> You guys ready to see how it all works? Let's go.
>> Oh, and let's get a message from our sponsor, Threat Locker. Learn more about
the benefits of zero trust security at their next ZTW event happening in March.
Luke went this year, and who knows who might make a surprise appearance next
time. Save $200 on your registration with code ZTWLTT26
using our link down below. 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 courts, 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 CQIS designer. It's
well, kind of terrifying. That is where Dave from CUCIs comes in.
>> You know, it's not bad considering you're selftaught. I'm impressed you got
something functional, but we could do better. Yeah, thanks to CUCISUS'
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 corner is 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 meters 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? This is your this is your Dante input.
>> It totally looks the same. Well, there's a yellow block. Shut up.
>> It actually I copied your block to start it with. >> See, I did a good job. I tried.
>> 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 uh USBC 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
Oops. >> 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 bminton on the other side, we [music] 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 [music] 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 carve them out of the audio spectrum. [music] >> 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? And 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 cuz that
microphone is going to move around the court and be in a different spot every
time. First in, first out, it's a cube.
>> 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?
Pretty good, actually. >> 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, and 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. >> Gas light, gatekeep, girl boss.
>> I'm so psyched cuz 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 [music] as simple as it looks?
>> I don't know. Let's see. >> Hello.
>> Cool. 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]
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?
>> Well, we did that and we did more.
>> Sorry, Dan. Dan is using one of those super cool little Bluetooth Dante
adapters. [music] Dante is an incredible ecosystem, man. You can plug freaking
anything into it and out of it. [music] So whether it's like Bluetooth or XLR in
or a 3 and 12 mm jack, you just need one of these little PoE adapters. [music]
So, he's playing Bluetooth audio off of his phone over at the reception. And
then we're gonna try out the ducking when I try to
>> talk over it in order to page the Wow, that's tremendous.
>> And dude, this is going to be great for lands because we've got the ability to
at a moment's notice >> be like, "Shut up. The tournament's now.
Everybody pay attention." And it's freaking loud. Even when I'm right 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. 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 [music] 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 [music] 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 [music] 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's 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 Champ 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." Um,
which shows you again Dan, shout out Dan, how important it was the stuff that
Dan did >> and 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. >> Could we have more than one of those?
>> As many as you want. >> Would they would they like sync the settings or No, that it would just
address whoever they're set to address. [gasps]
>> How much gets it? >> Uh, a damn. I knew there was a catch.
>> It starts with four digits, but they're
metal and they're PoE. Mhm. >> 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 5 minutes till the end of the session. Hey everyone, it's 5 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 5
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. We should replace it with like a clack song. 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. You just drop in an audio file of whatever time you want to
have, select that from [music] your >> Absolutely. And my understanding is you
could build an interface specifically for that. Say, you know, they're doing
their hourly reminders. as a simplifiling
networking people get excited about networking is actually pretty cool.
>> What if it what if it said hey little thing
please move to the other court? [laughter]
>> 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 UniFi 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. >> What's 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, 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
CQIS, we can actually use CSS just like web designers would to create a
stylesheet for the entire user interface. >> Super cool. So, I built you a little CSS
and if we go and we were to apply it to our to our touch panel over here, we add
our Linus Smash Champs. Huzzah. >> Theoretically, everything is live.
>> Theoret uh 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, Raj.
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 Ubiquiti, which when we installed it did not have
proper support for Dante and Cucus. But now, thanks to the power of Ubiquiti
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 recently 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?
[music]
>> Thanks again to CQIS for helping us get the audio set up for this event.
Now, I guess the only thing that remains is this segue.
[cheering] >> You guys are great.
>> Threat Locker. Zero Trust World 2026 is happening in Orlando, Florida from March
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which we're going to have linked in the video description. 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 INF 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.
CUCIs has some amazing products and services.