Installing speakers in key areas of your school is the most traditional way of creating a School Radio system.

Speakers can be installed in classrooms, corridors, dining areas, common rooms and even outside in the playground but the problem has always been that installing a speaker system can be very expensive and disruptive to the school.

Luckily, times have moved on and technology now allows you to use your existing IT network to distribute audio around your school meaning that speakers can be fitted anywhere where there is power and a network point.

Here is how it works.

The output of your School Radio studio is encoded into a digital format (such as Windows Media) by some special software that we can run on your Studios Myriad PC.

The encoded audio stream is then pushed to one of your existing Windows servers that we can then configure to re-distribute the audio around your network. If you do not have a Windows Server at the school that we can use then there is an alternative but it is a little more 'techy'.

This encoded audio stream is then available to any device in your school that can play an encoded stream via a media player (so that is all PC's and MACs as well as interactive whiteboards etc).

In areas where you want speakers fitting, we use a hardware decoder box (called a Barix) to decode the audio and amplify it to the correct level. Then all we have to do is fit the speakers to the wall and connect them up to the decoder box.

We can fit both internal and external speakers so if you wanted to have your School Radio station available in a portion of the playground then as long as there is a room near by with a network point then we can sort that out for you.

Once the internal network streaming is setup, any PC or device connected to your network can listen to it and unlike Web Streaming, because it is all done on your own equipment, there is no additional costs (other than music licensing but you will need that regardless of technology). So the only costs would be the physical costs of buying and installing the decoder boxes and speakers.

It would not normally be possible for people outside of the School to access these streams because of security issues which is why we also offer Web Streaming packages.

Obviously, the costs of installing a speaker system in your school will depend on the areas that you wish to be covered, the amount of speakers and the time needed to complete the job but the following example will give you some ideas about the costs involved.

Example Speaker Installation

In this example we will look at a school that wishes to add two speakers to the main hall and four speakers in one section of the playground.

We assume that they have a School Radio package installed and that both the main hall and a classroom adjacent to the playground have a free power and network point.

The costs for this installation would be as follows,

In The Studio

1 x Podblaster Audio Level Processor (optional but recommended) £495

In The Main Hall

1 x Barix 200 Decoder £ 350

2 x Internal External Speakers £ 218

1 x Speaker Cable £ 25

In The Playground

1 x Barix 200 Decoder £ 350

4 x Internal External Speakers £ 436

1 x Speaker Cable £ 25

Installation

1 x Additional Days Installation £150 (inc £200 discount)

Total £ 2049

This is assuming that we are already on site installing the studio package otherwise there would also be a travel charge on this.

In most cases, a site visit will be required in order to provide an accurate quote for speaker system installation but this can usually be done at the same time as we demonstrate the overall School Radio package.

Contact sales for more information.