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BIAMP’s AudiaFLEX helps Austin & Mercy Hospitals in Melbourne
Australian Sound Services, an established evacuation, PA and A/V system installation company, were hired to design and commission the audio evacuation and paging system. They based this system around Biamp's AudiaFLEX digital audio platforms, linked together via TCP/IP over Ethernet for control and CobraNet for audio. The principal reason for this choice was that they would be easily able to expand this system in the future. A side benefit was that the users of the system were not quite sure of exactly what functionality they required until the system was up and running, but the AUDIA System allowed changes to be made on a software level, without additional cost or hardware. The control of the system throughout the buildings is via Crestron touch panels and Chris Nichols has designed a very simple and intuitive user interface for these panels to allow unskilled operators to confidently operate the system. As well as this, the Biamp AUDIA units were programmed in a very logical and innovative manner to allow preconfigured priority levels to be set automatically according to where the page was initiated and what level it was given. This is especially important given that Code Blue warnings are initiated from these touch-panels and as these are life-critical and extremely time sensitive, they must be handled faultlessly every time. A combination of products from AUDIA, Crestron and Chris Nichols’ programming ensures that this happens. There is one AudiaFLEX unit located in the central control room, with a further 3 on different floors of the Austin Hospital tower and 2 within the Mercy hospital tower. The amplification is handled by evacuation specific 30, 50, 100 and 250w Simplex power amplifiers linking to the Simplex fire control panel. The speakers chosen were Altronics Redback 200mm dual-concentric ceiling speakers which give a high level of speech intelligibility along with a very pleasant quality of background music.
Although this is a highly complex system, it has worked faultlessly from day one and the customer’s satisfaction can be gauged by the fact that Australian Sound Services have already been engaged to extend the system to the LTB Heart surgery centre and are being asked to provide a solution to extend this level of control and sound quality to all the other buildings on the campus. They have also been asked to specify audio and evacuation systems for a number of other hospital sites in the Melbourne area and they are committed to using AUDIA in these systems as they are delighted by its performance in the Austin & Mercy hospital systems. All in all an excellent result – a happy customer, a satisfied contractor and most importantly, potential lives saved by simple and intuitive control, excellent speech intelligibility and system reliability. For more information please visit www.audioproducts.com.au or www.biamp.com.
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The Austin and Mercy Hospitals are two newly built hospitals on a site which already includes several existing buildings and which will eventually include a large number of separate facilities to comprise a regional care campus. These hospitals are run by the state (Victoria) health department but they are built by private companies and are leased back to the government.
Each zone is able to select between two different background music sources which in turn are automatically over-ridden by recorded messages, local pages, central pages, code pages and finally by fire alarm. This is all configured within the AUDIA system.
