Does this sound familiar?
Common scenarios for schools:
- Speakers stop working and kids can’t hear important announcements.
- Audio quality degrades over time, and worst-case-scenario, kids can’t hear an emergency announcement.
- Your school campus is expanding to new buildings and/or new trailers. You need to extend your PA system to reach new school areas.
You contact your technician to troubleshoot your broken PA System.
Your technician gives you bad news and more bad news.
- Your speaker needs to be replaced, and your brand of speakers has been discontinued.
- The wiring has deteriorated and requires more labor than just a discontinued speaker replacement.
- There’s an amplifier that also needs to be replaced.
Band-Aid Fixes for an Analog PA System
- Contact multiple vendors to find your discontinued analog speaker. (Quen Voyles, IT Director, St. Edward’s School would purchase hard-to-find analog PA system speakers knowing that more speakers would fail and he needed to have equipment on hand.)
- Stretch your budget to fix the most critical areas or areas with the least amount of re-wiring.
- Not recommended, but we even heard from one school that recorded their morning announcements and played the recording in classrooms without functional speakers. It was a painful solution for non-time sensitive announcements, and a complete disaster if an emergency situation were to arise.
Every school year, more analog speakers fail and your PA system repairs costs increase.
How many band-aids can you put on your old broken analog PA system?
Options for Solutions to your PA System Problems
Unfortunately, your old analog PA system is outdated and will require more frequent and expensive repairs for years to come. You partner with your school board and your installer to budget for a permanent solution that will save your school money in the long run.
Option 1 – Analog Replacement
Replace your old analog system with a new analog system. Completely replace the wiring and equipment at a huge cost. The problems of this option are:
- No new features, no flexibility with an analog system
- Wiring will continue to deteriorate and age
Option 2 – Hybrid Replacement
A hybrid system is an analog back-end with an IP head. This option was proposed to Dante McNeil, IT Director, Trinity Christian Academy, but he knew that this wouldn’t solve his PA system problems in the long term. Unfortunately, a hybrid system is just another temporary solution.
Option 3 – All IP Digital PA System Replacement
Fortunately, the best solution doesn’t always have to be the most expensive. An all IP PA system is more affordable and more reliable:
- Affordable: If your school is not already wired for Cat5e (or higher), you can save almost 50% on home runs and ports with Wahsega’s exclusive wiring reduction technology.
- Effortless Zone Announcements: Send live or pre-recorded announcements to the entire campus or specific zones.
- Zero-Touch Provisioning: Add a new speaker without cutting drywall by dropping-in one of our 2×2 ceiling speakers. The speakers self-provision on the Carina platform.
Carina: Complete School Communications System
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