Barix AG Intercom Devices Tapped By Union Station In Los Angeles

  • Jun 11, 2007

Barix AG recently announced Amtrak is using its Annuncicom 100 IP intercom devices for station-wide announcements at Union Station in Los Angeles. The scalable, cost-efficient platform allows Amtrak to use its existing analog infrastructure to stack and sequence outgoing announcements with Barix IP paging technology instead of replacing it with an entirely new and costlier telephone paging system with priority messaging.

Epsilon Systems Solutions Inc., Security Technology Business Unit, of California procured and integrated the Barix Annuncicom 100 devices into the existing infrastructure, with only basic rewiring needed to accomodate the Barix units.

The simplistic design uses five Barix Annuncicom 100 devices as inputs to receive announcements and one Annuncicom 100 at the output to deliver the announcements over the speaker system. Amtrak operators use traditional microphones to make their announcements, which are then sent over a phone path and into one of the five devices.

The announcements are then converted from analog audio to a digital stream. If the output device is available, the announcement is directly streamed to the output (where it is converted back to analog) with a very small delay. If the output Annuncicom is already busy with another stream or previously recorded message, the Annuncicom 100 stores the message in real time into flash memory, and sends the message as soon as the output is available. The unit is capable of receiving a stream and simultaneously play back a previously recorded message. The five-input Annuncicoms compete for the output device, and the system can easily be expanded to more inputs by adding more Annuncicoms.

“Barix was the perfect choice for this project because they were the only vendor that could so seamelessly implement modern, digital IP intercom technology into an existing analog paging system,” said Bryan Min, president and CEO of Epsilon Systems. “Barix was able to keep the product and integration costs to a minimum for Amtrak while also providing the customized programming that Amtrak required. The Barix devices and the simplicity of the overall system design means that Amtrak can easily and cost-efficiently scale the system to a IP paging and intercom solution to their needs in the future.”

Barix custom-programmed the units with BCL (Barix Control Language) code to meet Amtrak’s requirements of prioritizing multiple announcements as described by Barnett. The Annuncicom 100 devices at Union Station in Los Angeles connect to line converters at the input to accept the analog signals, and to a pre-amp and amplifier system at the output en route to the speaker system.

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