SynAudCon’s Emergency Communication Systems (ECS) Speech Intelligibility Workshop is scheduled for January 3-5, 2013 at the American Airlines Training and Conference Center in Dallas, TX.
The facility has a mock-up of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport terminal with an adjacent 300-seat auditorium. It comes complete with a reverberant field, arch ceilings, large windows—all the problems that plague large spaces.
Training for American Airline employees is closed during the first week of January, so SynAudCon Workshop attendees will have the complex to themselves.
SynAudCon’s John Murray has written that the Emergency Communications Systems (ECS) market, including Fire Emergency Voice/Alarm Communications Systems (Fire EVACS) and Mass Notifications Systems (MNS), is expected to grow to a 5 billion-dollar business by 2016.
“Historically, this type of business was strictly controlled by the fire-alarm/security industry,” Murray explained. “However, in 2010 the new fire code, NFPA-72, Chapter 24 now requires Fire EVACS and MNS systems to produce intelligible announcements not just audible annunciation. And this new version of the code is being adopted faster than any version in the history of the NFPA.”
He emphasized that “the bulk of this business will be going to companies that understand this new code, understand the Speech Transmission Index (STI), are able to measure it, and know how to design sound systems that will produce good STI results.”
The focus of the SynAudCon ECS Speech Intelligibility Workshop will be on the FA code and in designing and measuring sound systems with good STI results.
