This example illustrates how to use a Distributed Program Bus to deliver a variety of audio inputs to all zones in your system. The only difference between this scenario and the most basic scenario is the addition of more inputs to the Distributed Program Bus and the use of control linking to provide end users with control over which input to play.
You are designing the audio system for a large conference center that has many different meeting rooms as well as public spaces. One requirement is to provide five choices for background music to be played in any zone at any time. The five input sources come from a subscription to five different commercial music programs.
Because all of these inputs are required for all zones in the system, the Distributed Program Bus is the perfect solution.
The commercial receivers are located in the rack room with the HAL and are, therefore, connected directly to five HAL analog input ports.
note: These names will serve as the initial DR display names when you link a DR to these inputs.
The zones in this audio system include one for each conference room as well as a zone for the main lobby and for the office area. In reality, there would likely be additional zones, but we'll limit our scenario to only these zones.
As you can see, the Distributed Program Bus is included by default in each Zone Processor.
note: At this point you would configure various aspects of each Zone Processor. But we're going to skip over most of that configuration as this scenario is focused on the Distributed Program Bus. Instead, we'll jump right to giving your end users remote access to the input channels delivered via the Distributed Program Bus. For details on working with Zone Processors, click here.
note: You would also, of course, need to wire the audio to one or more outputs, but we'll skip those steps as well to keep our focus on the Distributed Program Bus.
To give your end users selection control over the five commercial channels connected to the Distributed Program Bus, you simply configure a control link between a DR and a zone's selection of incoming channels.
There are other parameters to configure (the Priority Inputs, a link between the Level block and the DR3 Level control, and so on), but we'll save those discussions for another topic. As far as providing end users with control over the five incoming commercial music channels (supplied by the Distributed Program Bus), you're done! You would, of course, repeat this process for each zone.