Everyone has stood in a station or mall and heard an announcement that was clearly loud and completely unintelligible. In a normal day that is an annoyance. In an emergency it is a failure. Clarity, not volume, is what matters.
Why clarity is hard
Large spaces, hard surfaces, atriums and background noise all smear speech. Sound bounces, arrives at the listener multiple times, and the words blur together. Simply turning up the volume often makes this worse, not better.
How good design achieves it
- Modelling speaker coverage before installation
- Choosing and aiming speakers for even coverage
- Controlling reverberation with the space's acoustics
- Measuring speech intelligibility (STI) on site at commissioning
Measured, not assumed
Professional voice-alarm design predicts intelligibility during design and verifies it with measurements after installation, to an agreed standard. A system that is only tested for being loud enough has not really been tested at all.
Related: Public Address & Voice Evacuation
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