Building on experience in the voice alarm (VA) market for the rail and airport sectors, ASL has developed Vipedia to bridge the gap between professional audio industry networks and life-safety systems on major projects including sports venues and airports.
Vipedia is a Dante™-enabled, voice alarm-compliant audio routing and distribution system. It conforms to all industry standards for VA systems while providing audio quality and digital networking capacity suitable for pro audio installers working on major stadia, airport and rail terminus projects.
The system is modular; option cards plug into the back of the unit providing various processing, control and interface functionality, with the software and hardware being partitioned for ‘life-safety’ and ‘non-life- safety’ functions. This allows a set of comprehensive DSP functions to be built without compromising the operation of the system in an emergency. Like ASL’s iVENCS site management software, Vipedia’s GUI can import 2D and 3D models directly from standard industry CAD packages such as 3DS Max and the freely-available Google SketchUp®, now gaining rapid acceptance with over a million users.
Potential for flexible audio networking techniques is included, so allowing large distributed systems to be built with integration to professional high-power amplifiers. Notably, the adoption of Audinate’s Dante™ network protocol has enabled the first collaboration with Swedish amplifier manufacturer Lab.gruppen. Vipedia integrates seamlessly with Lab.gruppen’s PLM™ series powered loudspeaker management systems, which are also based on Dante™, enabling fully integrated control, monitoring and audio all on the same network as well as low latency, tight synchronisation and full redundancy for all channels. Vipedia runs on industry standard 100Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet networks.
Richard Lack, ASL’s Sales and Marketing Director, said: “Vipedia is the bridge between ASL’s environment of life safety and voice alarm, and the professional audio world of digital networking and signal processing. As audio and network infrastructures become evermore complex, we had to find a way of integrating voice alarm requirements into the audio system and vice versa, without compromise on either side. Vipedia meets these requirements.”