Inexpensive PA systems

[MIPS64]

Took a good ol' fashioned emergency yesterday for the powers that be to realize we need a PA system in our building. Looking for something that is inexpensive, preferably below $10K total. We have about 10 individual rooms we'd have to put speakers, then many open areas that would probably need 2-3 speakers to cover the square footage. Any recommendations? Network based would be cool but I understand costs could skyrocket. We are currently going to stick some IP phones in each room and announce over that until we get something installed.

 

[statikregimen]

You could probably piece something together from thrift shops, to be honest... Even doing it brand new would be cheap, if you're piecing something together...Just need an amp with enough power and outputs (see below), mic, speakers and plenty of speaker wire. If you know how to hook up speakers to an amp, and can run the wire yourself, you could do the installation for them and make yourself a few bucks. Unless you're looking for studio quality sound, there's really no need to buy a specialized kit, or spend a lot of money. If they have drop-ceilings, would make installation a snap. At most, would just have to cut circles in some tiles for the speakers, and buy some grills to make it look professional.

For the amp and speakers, just match the impedance...You should be able to effectively double the outputs, if you use speakers that are half the rated impedance of the amp (e.g. use two 2omh speakers per output on a 4ohm amp).

 

[grandfatman]

What kind of things are you looking to use the system for? If you want to go networked, and depending on the application, a small digital console might be worth looking into, not sure how it would work for multi rooms (im a live sound engineer not an installations engineer) But you can literally run a cat 5 cable from your source (mixing console) to your playback (the pa system) Multi rooms can probably get expensive with the amount of equipment needed. It really depends when you say you need a "PA" system, to define what its intended use is.

 

[MIPS64]

Basically to make announcements and page people if they are needed. Like I said, right now we are using IP phones which is a huge waste. Would be nice to be able to play pre-recordered messages as well, such as we are closing, etc. We had an issue where we had to evacuate the building and found that it was not acceptable to do it without some sort of PA system.

 

[grandfatman]

where are you based?