YangQuan train station situated on a new high speed rail line has been equipped with a Q-Sys fully integrated digital audio platform. PCI won the contract for the public address and fire alarm broadcast system when a tender went out last year.
The ancient city of YangQuan in Shanxi Province originally built its train station in 1905 to facilitate the exploitation of the local mines — making the city one of the birthplaces of Shanxi's modern industry.
Today China is in the midst of constructing a huge high speed rail (HSR) network, embracing a distance of 120,000km in total by the year 2020, at an aggregated investment of RMB 5 trillion (€541 billion). YangQuan forms an important part of that network.
The contract for public address and fire alarm broadcast in the station went out to tender in May last year — with PCI competing with a number of market leaders in public address and voice evacuation — both on an international and local basis.
With many of the solutions on offer driven by low cost and traditional approaches, main contractors Easyway is claimed to have opted for the PCI solution due to Q-Sys’ processing power and intuitive mode of operation.
Easyway set up its own digital platform through which all system applications could interface, allowing control of each dedicated system.
“The ease with which Q-Sys communicated with this protocol was a big selling point in its favour,” said PCI technical director, Liu Shaowei. “Q-Sys was installed and tested in half a day, including field adjustment. It was simple to install and powerful and easy to use.”
The full system architecture, covering 16 public address zones, consists of a Core 1000, in which the internal 64-bit processing provides incredible headroom, and two I/O Frames.
One I/O Frame contains four CIML4 premium mic/line input cards, providing five noise sensors, five paging messages — as well as a broadcast mic and a radio receiver. Outputs comprise four CODP DataPort and four COL4 line outputs.
The other I/O Frame is connecting to two DAB-801 amplifier back-up panels, offering full redundancy and ten DataPort-equipped CX302V twin-channel amplifiers. Fire signals and voice alerts are fed directly to the DAB-801, so that the system can switch automatically to emergency mode, with the ‘duck’ function activated when the voice alert or emergency signal is present.