Wait, that's my car! It's 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, we 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 mind-blowing, 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 gym and 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 spray-on foam and went with a fiberglass spray-on 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 porosity 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 birds, 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 usable. 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 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-ceiling 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 modularity 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 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 endpoints. 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 cordon 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 Soundtube 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 echoing of the

space but you can see as I move around this actually pretty usable Crank It Up Dan let's [Music] 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

[Music] 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 Shure Beta 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-Sys. I guess oh did did they hook us up with software, is it subscription? No, it's a perpetual license. We did have to pay

for a whole bunch 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? Because we're using Q-Sys. Exactly. So Q-Sys is a network manageable audio, video, and control program, right? So, we just don't need a mixer. 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. It's a latency issue or a 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 V-Line 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 preconfigure 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 the 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 USB-C, 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

It's 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'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

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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 place

I Won’t Let This Happen to You! - LAN Center Audio Tour

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Addressing poor sound quality in a new building

Initial sound quality issues due to echo.

Sound treatment similar to previous projects (studio, lab, workshop).

Badminton gym and gaming center project update; city approval received.

Ceiling treatment with fiberglass spray-on acoustic treatment (thinner, paintable, mold-resistant).

Wall treatment with gym mats to absorb sound and provide seating.

Exploring sound system options for the building

Need for a system that is clear, intuitive, customizable, and suitable for various events.

Traditional PA system considered but found to be unbalanced and inflexible.

Constant voltage system considered but deemed insufficient in sound quality.

Ethernet-based system explored for high-fidelity audio and modularity.

Dante audio-over-IP system chosen for its quality, scalability, and manufacturer support.

Implementation and configuration of the Dante system

Use of Q-Sys for system management, despite initial complexity.

System successfully implemented with 30 speakers, wireless microphones, and adaptable volume controls.

Implementation of volume ramps for gradual sound adjustments and zone control.

Future plans include a user-friendly interface (iPad) for zone selection and event modes.

Use of Soundtube power-over-ethernet speakers.

Technical details and cost of the sound system

Use of 16 Dante transmit flows for various zones.

Q-Sys used for audio management, eliminating the need for a mixer.

Dante's network requirements and the use of UniFi network equipment.

Simple speaker setup using PoE and VLANs.

Use of various Dante adapters for different input/output needs.

Total cost of the setup was approximately $20,000.

Cost-effectiveness and adaptability of the system.

Easy expansion possibilities by adding PoE ports.

Future potential for adding a PA system to other areas.