Swicthvox PBX -- Warehouse Speaker System ?

[sab1]

We have an old 70 volt, 2 wire system with generic overhead speakers from 10+ years ago, and want to get this equipment working with Swicthvox.

We can get a 4-port FXS card and paging interface for about $500/site (we have 4 sites in different states, and each site has 5+ existing speakers) to make it work, but management thinks there might be a cheaper option.

Does anyone have a better cheaper solution ?

Maybe some type of adapter/converter ?

[sterlingmarking]

We literally took a Polycom soundpoint IP 331 apart, soldered wires to the speaker leads, and fed those into the input on our PA amplifier. We only have one zone paging (page everything!) and it has worked fine for the past 2 years. Thats probably as cheap as you can get.

We just added that extension number to our paging extension so all the phones and the overhead speakers play the same page simultaneously.

It has the added benefit of being provisioned the same way as all our other phones so everything is uniform.

[jprichard]

Check out the SIP paging devices from Valcom..the VIP series. Not sure how the pricing compares, but the interface and GUI is top-notch; programs like any SIP device, and gives the ability to (for instance) extend a paging audio pair of wires across and IP network, and/or register as a SIP extension and auto-answer a call to the device and send the output out its T/R paging connections, to your self-powered speaker or paging amplifier.

-jp