Designing a large or complex audio system can be daunting. There’s so much to think about apart from the obvious like ‘will it work’. For design and build projects in particular, M&E main contractors will often want to see the specialist sound or AV contractor providing layout drawings, cabling schedules, system schematics, compliance with relevant standards, electro-acoustic modelling, and performance predictions just to mention a few on what can sometimes be a very long list. Then there’s the design of the actual audio system itself, be it for performance audio in a concert or theatre type venue or commercial audio for public address or voice evacuation.

Whatever you’re designing for, this can amount to a lot of work and many person hours to produce. At Audomation we’ve designed for some pretty varied projects from national stadiums to office buildings, stations to shopping malls and hotels to places of worship. Whether you just need some short term assistance to help produce a CAD drawing or two, you need an electro-acoustic simulation model to assess the performance of a loudspeaker system, or you want a complete design package with all the documentation, either way we would be pleased to help.

First steps would be to find out a little bit more about the project and how you would like us to help, this can be done over the phone, through Teams, Zoom or Facetime, or, if its a bit more involved, we would be more than happy to visit you at your office or project site - we think it’s always nicer to talk face to face! From these initial discussions we can then provide you with a no obligation quotation for the work you require and hopefully we would move forward together as part of your team from there.

One of the key advantages of outsourcing in this way is that you get immediate access to the specialist skill set you need, only for the time you need it, and all at a very competitive cost which won’t impact your regular payroll.

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A rack (or sometimes many racks in a larger project!) is usually the heart, soul and brains of a PA or AV system. The whole success of an installation can hang in the balance if they are not built to a good standard, but unfortunately this aspect of some projects doesn’t get the credit and priority it deserves. Trying to load and wire expensive, precision electronic equipment into the rack on the job site can be a recipe for disaster. Dirty, dusty conditions, poor lighting, lack of space, working around other trades, not having just the right connectors and cables to hand when you need them, can all have a negative effect on the quality of the rack build, but if it’s not done right, this one, probably minor, part of the complete project can quickly erode your profit margins when return visits become necessary, and destroy customer confidence and your relationship with you client almost overnight.

Audomation believe a high quality rack build is essential to the success of any project so we offer a full rack build service at our workshops in Hednesford, Staffordshire. All of your equipment is carefully loaded, always using the correct rack supports and mounting hardware to suit the weight of the equipment, and is then wired to a very high standard using only quality, branded, components and connectors. We hold large stocks of cables and connectors too, to ensure your rack can be turned around quickly and efficiently.

Every single rack is fully tested, and if it contains digital equipment also fully programmed, before it leaves our factory making the whole process virtually plug and play when it arrives at the job site. If the rack is part of an emergency evacuation system that needs to meet the EN54-16 manufacturing standards it also receives the certification and CE markings required before it leaves. All racks are also shipped with full ‘as wired’ schematic drawings, termination schedules, health and safety documentation, and full backup copy’s of any software configuration files used, as standard.

For larger systems consisting of several racks it’s now almost ubiquitous that they are interconnected on a network backbone. We have a vast experience of the digital audio network topologies in use today including Dante, CobraNet, Q-LAN, VoIP, and more, so the IP address allocations and network hardware will also be set up and configured correctly to match your protocol of choice.

Want to witness our testing procedure? Not a problem, we are happy to provide Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) to suit.

Need help commissioning the system on site? We offer a range of optional services to test and commission the whole system once the rack is installed, which can also include setting up all of the audio parameters for you, measurements for loudspeaker coverage, sound pressure levels and intelligibility, and user training.

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Audomation started life as a software company providing bespoke audio control software and hardware programming. This is still a very important part of our business and we continue to work with product from many of the worlds leading audio manufacturers including;

• Bosch Praesideo, Paviro & Plena
• BSS Soundweb
• Dynacord ProMatrix & SONICUE
• Electro-Voice IRIS-Net
• Harman Audio Architect
• Peavey MediaMatrix
• QSC Q-Sys
• Yamaha DME/MTX

Apart from writing the code, designing the hardware signal flow and developing unique user interfaces, many projects also require custom widgets and scripts to get everything talking to each other and basically doing what you want it to do.

A lot of our work is written using C#, WPF, and the Microsoft .Net framework, and Lua and Python scripting languages, as well as manufacturers proprietary configuration software. So we’d like to think we can come up with a solution whether you need just a simple configuration file for an audio processor or a custom user control interface that can integrate with the audio hardware, the network hardware, UPS backup power supplies, building management systems, the lighting, the video, the shades…

Need some extra help with an existing project? We can also help remotely using clever little app's like LogMeIn, TeamViewer and RealVNC.

Want to know more? Why not get in touch now?