You are designing an audio system for a large hotel. The hotel has many hallways, several public restrooms, and a parking garage in which a single channel of background music will play. The hotel owners want to be able to page into these areas ... individually and collectively.
These public areas (hallways, restrooms, parking garage) require minimal audio configuration and control. Because only one audio channel is sent to these areas, there is no need for selection control. The design question at this point is what type of block to use for these zones. Should you use a Zone Processor block or a standalone Paging Zone block? There are pros and cons to each approach.
Using a Zone Processor block gives you the Distributed Program Bus which could supply the one background channel to all three areas. The Zone Processor block also provides the needed Paging Zone block. But the Zone Processor is also providing functionality that isn't needed in this particular situation, such as priority selection, selection control, and additional Level blocks that could lead to confusion later when installing and working with the system. If you want to keep the system as simple and streamlined as possible, you may want to use the standalone Paging Zone block instead.
Instead of using Zone Processors, you could add a Paging Zone block for each area: Hallways, Restrooms, Parking Garage. Unlike with the Zone Processor approach, you would then have to wire the background music channel to each paging zone. This wiring is an additional step, but you end up with a simpler system that does specifically what you want. So the choice is yours as to which approach is best for your situation.
The next section illustrates the configuration of the Paging Zone approach.
note: To shorten this example, we assume that the paging stations have already been configured.
Example Details
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