Providing Simple, No Selection Background Music in all Zones

This example illustrates the most basic use of the Distributed Program Bus—providing a single input to all zones in an installation.

Example Scenario

You are designing an audio system for a large department store that has multiple floors. The department store owner wants to play the same background music in all areas of the store and plans to use a commercial channel to provide the music.

Because of this department store's size (many different departments over three floors), its audio system will need many different zones—primarily to facilitate paging into individual areas of the store. This multi-zone characteristic in combination with a common input needed in all zones makes this a perfect scenario for using the Distributed Program Bus. Without the Distributed Program Bus, you would need to wire that single input into every zone in the system. But with the Distributed Program Bus, you wire it once and you're done!

Configuring the System

1. Configure the input.

The commercial music receiver is located in the rack room with the HAL and is, therefore, connected directly to a HAL analog input port.

In the I/O palette in the Processing Workspace, locate the Analog Input Port to which the commercial receiver is connected.
Drag the Mic/Line Input block into your Processing Map. Optionally, customize the Channel name. We'll call it Commercial Music.
Double-click the Mic/Line Input block to open its properties dialog box and configure its Sensitivity and Level appropriately.

2. Configure the Distributed Program Bus.

In the DSP palette, locate the Distributed Program Bus (in the Paging/Room Combine category) and drag it into the Processing Map, placing it to the right of the Mic/Line Input block you just configured.
Wire the output from the Mic/Line Input block to the DPB 1 input node on the Distributed Program Bus. To do so, simply click the Mic/Line Output node and then click the DPB 1 input node. A wire appears between the two nodes.
Optionally, customize the name of the input node on the Distributed Program Bus by clicking the node name and then typing the new name in the text edit box that appears. We'll stick with Commercial Music.

3. Configure the system's Zone Processors.

To keep things simple, we'll assume each floor of the department store is a separate zone.

In the DSP palette, locate the Zone Processor block (in the Paging/Room Combine category).
Drag three Zone Processor blocks (one for each floor) into your Processing Map. Optionally, customize the name of each Zone Processor by clicking its name and typing the new name in the text edit box that appears. We'll call them Floor 1, Floor 2, and Floor 3.

As you can see, the Distributed Program Bus is included in each Zone Processor by default. So, for this simple single input, no selection example, you are finished! Of course, you may want to configure certain parameters within the Zone Processor blocks themselves, but as far as getting this single channel of background music to all of your zones, you've done it!

note: You would, of course, need to wire the audio to one or more outputs, but we'll skip those steps for now as the focus of this example is the creation and use of the Distributed Program Bus.