I’m wondering if anyone has any experience with PA / intercom systems that specialize in a dead simple one to many and individual communication mechanism like a PA or intercom with PA features? Basically I just need to be able to have these intercoms in like 5 rooms, and I need for each intercom to be able to instantly PA to another room… no “calling”, no need for two-way communication… just be able to hit or hold a button and instantly be heard in the addressed room.
I’ve tried various “intercoms” which do have “automatic answer” but it’s a tedious process of calling and waiting for 5 seconds while things “ring and ring” until it decides to connect.
You can press a “group” button which will do what I want and instantly put my voice in another room, but “group” will address ALL intercoms at the same time… which is not what I want.
Awesome thank you… the next best the I can think of is putting an Amazon echo dot in each room and using drop in which routes everything though Amazon which I hate.
Other solutions were a Mytel3300 provisioning server or a cloud based solution.
The VVx500 has a feature that I can’t really remember what it was called, but it’s essentially the Red phone you see in movies. When it’s picked up it rings the other phones and instantly connects. You can configure it so it just runs through the intercom though.
The cloud based solutions were really easy to setup but we needed to keep everything on location. It was for the VP debates last year. Our solution worked flawlessly with the polycomms
If you want to look at a more PA-style approach rather than VoIP, you could use something like a ClearOne Converge 880. It is an audio mixer that has 12 inputs (8 can operate at microphone level and provide phantom power) and 12 outputs, it has full matrix switching so any combination of inputs can be sent to any combination of outputs, you can program it with switching and volume presets which can then be activated by pulling an IO pin to ground (or over RS232, ethernet, etc.).
You would probably want an amplifier for each output (Wondom make a bunch of decent, cheap amplifiers, stick 3 small ones in a box with an old laptop PSU and you’ve got a 6 channel amp for < $50). I have seen setups where people have directly driven speakers from the mixer and while it’s not particularly loud and it’s outside of manufacturer spec, it did work OK.