Security is a key concern for the school, and to upgrade the small paging system in place, it turned to Staines-based installers SDD Sound & Light to provide a campus-wide system, which could be linked together to provide pre-recorded announcement and other advanced security features across the three sites.
SDD chose Bosch Praesideo, the world's first fully digital public address and emergency sound system, because unlike traditional PA systems, which connect all elements to a central controller, Praesideo uses a network configuration, offering great flexibility in terms of zone assignments and numbers, call stations, audio inputs and outputs.
At each of the school's sites, engineers split the campus into different paging zones, enabling individual control access across the zones to target specific areas. The largest campus, Cobham, was split into some 70 zones. Fibre optic cabling links the buildings, ensuring signal integrity and allowing for considerable distances to be covered. In addition, the systems are linked via Internet, enabling pre-recorded announcements to be sent out simultaneously across the campuses, and allowing for the entire system to be monitored both in-house and remotely at the SDD offices.
Nigel Clark, operations manager at SDD Sound & Light, explains: "This is the most complex installation of the Bosch Praesideo system in the UK to date. It took a team of eight SDD engineers six months to complete, using all of the expertise of our IT engineers to successfully link the three systems together over the Internet . . . The project required an extraordinary total of 30km of fibre optic cables and 20km of copper cabling for speakers. The system is so advanced that if, for example, a microphone is accidentally unplugged, an alert is transmitted over the Internet to the SDD offices.
"The Bosch Praesideo system can also be used in non-emergency situations. At the state-of-the-art sports facilities on the Cobham campus, the Praesideo system serves a dual purpose as an integrated music and paging system, broadcasting music and MTV in the main arena, two gyms, two dance studios and the competition standard pool, as well as sending out important pre-recorded announcements.
"The Bosch products have allowed us greater precision and control by using fibre optics for the distribution of audio signals where we would ordinarily have used copper or radio link. Coupled with real-time remote monitoring of the system," concludes Nigel, "Bosch technology has enabled us to satisfy client requirements and stay within budgets."
(Lee Baldock)
