We recently received a call from a customer in distress concerning their 30+ year old public address system failing. They have had their IT guy and electrician working on the system and have given up. The PA system had a constant hum, many of the ceiling and PA horn speakers were not working. Furthermore they were blowing amplifiers, they had 120+ 1/2 watt ceiling speakers in their 70 – 80,000 square foot facility covering 3 floors which should consume 50-70 watts of power they had 3 600 watt amplifiers attached to the system to get over the failed speaker consumption and to power the remaining speakers.
Arriving onsite the first thing I noticed is how frustrated the customer was, they literally have tried and thrown everything they had at the issue and nothing changed. As they said “we need an expert”. The easiest way to fix the problem is to remove the old and replace it with new, a full forklift upgrade of the public address system, every ceiling speaker, every horn speaker, every amplifier and every cable which wasn’t really a fiscally responsible option. We discussed a good time to arrive onsite and to begin troubleshooting. On site, we fired up the PA Amplifier and began our work, slowly and meticulously removing the speakers that were not working or were marginally working. Although a speaker is not working that does not mean that the pa speaker isn’t consuming power from the public address amplifier, typically is consumes more, in some cases results as a dead short on the PA system.
During the troubleshooting and speaker replacement nearly 30% of the speakers needed replaced, over many hours of troubleshooting we eliminated no less than 3 dead shorts, one was both wires were grounded where prior troubleshooting and speaker work by well intentioned maintenance created the issue. In all we replaced almost 30% of all of the speakers, we were able to salvage all of the cabling except for a 10′ section. Also, of the 7 amplifiers onsite we were able to salvage one properly working 600 watt 70v amplifier that was working properly. Upon completion all 120+ of the speakers throughout the facility were operational, it is a mix of old and new, working flawlessly together. The customer was instructed to allow us to follow up with yearly maintenance and remove the failing speakers as they fail, not waiting until the issue becomes unmanageable, single small problems are easier troubleshot than many. The single amplifier is using less than 20% of it’s 600 watt capacity because all of the bad speakers and dead shorts have been removed from the system.
Thank you for the business!!!
Dayton
