wait that's my
carit 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
can but we can do it right I mean of
course but first we have to seg to our
sponsor Ridge start your holiday shopping now and save big during ridge's
Black Friday sale get up to 47% off by
going through our Link in the description today right now actually
when we first checked out this space the echo in here was absolutely
mindblowing 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 gymland gaming center which by
the way huge update we heard back from the city we're actually going to be able
to do wh land let's go starting with the ceilings we switched away from our usual
cellulose-based sprayon foam and went with a fiberglass sprayon acoustic
treatment it does still add a little bit of insulation which is always a good
thing but the most important fact 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 paracity 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 back rest 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 useable 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 oo 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 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 inflexibility 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 seiling 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 modul CL ity 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 that is
what we thought until Dan found Dante
which is built on previous AOE and aoip
Tech some of the key benefits of Dante are it's a 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 oh I knew there
was going to be a catch yeah you pay the Dante tax um but Dante controller lets
you configure the routing and you wanted modularity and ease of use yeah ease of
use was pretty big uh we want it to be something that any random staffer can
use or that something 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 land at 3 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 CIS 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 uh flows
and things like that especially as we've got loads of end points we have about 30
speakers we have wireless microphones and maybe we do want to do a traditional
PA when we do Lands cool but theoretically it works it does it's in
production right now uh they've been using it for the afternoon badminton uh
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 land participants who have just won something and get to talk to their
Idol um it's all a very consistent level
show me how we can cordin 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 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 up time 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 gym 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 land mode that'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 um 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 uh background music death which basically takes the entire
courts up to their maximum volume that I think is a uh 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 is as good a time as any to show you the speakers that we ended up using they're from sound tube
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 echoin of the
space but you can see as I move around this 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 uh 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 oh wait
we could 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 bet 58 wireless
mics and the thing is that they're the receiver is 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
Lands we can be on site we can do more weird things this is just the most basic
setup super easy to do thanks Q sis I
guess oh did did they hook us up with software is subcription no it's a
Perpetual licenses we did have to pay for a whole bun of licenses um 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 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 uh there's no mixer at all right cuz we're using CIS exactly so CIS
is a network manageable audio video and control program right so we just don't
need a mix it 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 a latency issue or
latency issue and a traffic issue as well you need very specific packet
switching okay but our UniFi stuff does it it does now oh up until extremely
recently UniFi was one of the only companies that you could not use Dante
with oh um and yet and yet they have released some Alpha version right now
which supports CYS Dante Crestron all of
those sort of switching protocols and you can actually see on our RGB switches
here the ones in this greeny yellow are specific Dante vline 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 would need to do to plug one of
these guys in oh yeah okay 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 AIO two analog
inputs yep there you go wow so that's
actually a camera no well so it's not going to
work I am watching you stop it on the subject of 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
preon figure 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 so when Chase is just rolling out land
equipment he all he needs to know is this goes there and boom it's ready to
go exactly super sick this one here is USBC
oh so it's blue it goes it's two-way communication so this is a 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 you know implementing this I think we're
still out ahead though absolutely and all we had to do is run Ethernet cable
and the adaptability pays for itself
yeah 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 that that'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 rocket money how
much do you think you're spending on subscriptions right now chances are it's
more than you realize especially if there's one that you forgot to cancel
from a couple of months ago but wait don't leave to do that right now why not
let rocket money do the heavy lifting for you think about it no more calendar
reminders no more surprise charges on your card and best of all no more 20
question opt out surveys rocket money can help you ask those subscriptions in
just a few clicks and that's not all they can even negotiate better rates on
things like your phone or internet bill on your behalf with all that money saved
then it's time to sign up for one extra thing right wrong rocket money can also
help you budget your hard-earned cash so you can work towards getting that new
computer upgrade or finally start padding out that savings account so get
started for free today at Rocket money.com LT or click the link in the
description to find out how you can unlock even more features with a Premium
plan 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 it's almost
done right it feels so together right
like look at this we got like access control on all the doors and everything
does that work yet yep yes everything's in