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TomSforza
Contributor I
November 21, 2016

School Audio System

Hi,

I'm a member of parent committee in my kids' school.

The direction plans to invest in a audio diffusion system. They received offers from companies but, according to me, too limited. It's a simple multi-diffusion system, wired with one amp.
The intended use is :
- background music
- personal announcement
- classes communication

As the whole school is covered by a wifi network. I wonder if it'd possible to:
- Use Sonos system with sound source in the director laptop (App)
- Add, in all classes (20) a play:1 device
- Add, in the Gym one (or two) Play:5 devices for scholar shows
- Use a mic on the laptop for communication diffusion through sonos system
According to me, main advantage of Sonos system, besides the high quality products, is the multi-room features and the possibility for teachers to add audio source to pass their own audio source for educative purpose (music, sound, audio books, ...)

That would be great as they are many class rooms, and more are under construction. This solution would be easy to implement and much more modular than wired solution with classic amp source.

What do your thnk ? Does anyone here used the Sonos system for corporate/school audio system ?
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    12 replies

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    dmnc
    Lyricist I
    November 23, 2018
    I'm not familiar with the term diffusion but...
    #4 - biggest concern I would have is that anyone with wifi access will have Sonos access and therefore access to sound in every room of the building. Seems could become troublesome as that can be easily exploited.

    Diffusion ... me neither but meaning is probably announcements? Nevermind...

    #4 - This is the smallest concern because you can put this subnet to the separate vlan (802.1q), create some separate SSID for it and don't send SSID in the beacons. Additionally apply 802.1p priorities for this vlan and rest of the traffic. Easy and effective.
    dmnc
    Lyricist I
    November 23, 2018
    Have you looked at the Ubiquity school system? It would do for much of your needs and will work alongside Sonos where that is a better fit for you.

    https://store.ubnt.com/collections/wireless/products/unifi-ac-edu

    Thanks Stanley_4. I'll look into this.

    Don't!

    I'm using UniFi EDU, cca 35 units. I'll never do this again. Mobile app is piece of crap. UBNT Android developers are from my country, they told me they are aware of many bugs but there are other priorities than this app (and the last release is 15m old). You can't do anything within the controller except terminate frozen stream (which is happening a lot). Controller has performance issues even on the strong server (Unifi Cloud Key is useless because is too weak), problem is traffic thru SWs and APs ... which effects Controller ... irony (maybe not, but statistics which I don't want). We're using it just for ring bell (because operate the announcements on the unstable system is hardly possible for skilled tech and impossible for the regular user like the school principal, etc) and streams are freezing often and one frozen stream can prevent the future for running. UBNT L1 support is very dumb and can't help you (they are asking i.e. if you have static IP of the controller), if you've been told that problem has been escalated, nothing happens for next weeks and months. Then with help from the distributor one day, the L3 support guy created a new issue and gave me some commands for system properties file and now we're trying to tune the Controller to be able to play the streams withou freezing. People from the school are very upset with the system we've installed there. :(

    Sidenote: I've been recommending the UniFi for a long time and I regret that. I've bought some UAP-AC-PROs and USW-24 (without PoE) for friend of mine to his new flat ... That switch has passive cooler (silence is good, rack is next to his room) but it is overheating without any load and I'm worried about HDDs running in the NAS in the same rack.

    Why am I here? Because another school wants some announcement system so I'm looking for the alternative solution.
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