People tell us the announcements sound awful
It sounds like you're hearing it from staff or visitors, and you can't tell whether it's the system, the building or the way the messages were recorded.
What you can check yourself
- Walk the building during a test broadcast, with a colleague at the microphone. Note where it's clear, where it's loud but muddy, and where it's too quiet to follow.
- Listen for one loudspeaker that's silent or distorted. A single failed loudspeaker on a circuit that otherwise works is not reported by the system's own monitoring; it's found by someone standing under it.
- Compare the busy space with the empty one. If it's clear when empty and lost when full, the noise is the limit, not the volume.
- Listen to the recorded message itself. A message recorded badly sounds bad through any system.
More loudspeakers won't fix the room
This is one of the hardest things to judge from inside a building. Hard surfaces, height and noise decide how clearly speech carries, as much as the equipment does, and turning it up often makes it worse. Where the room is the limit, the answer may be treatment, a shorter message or a different layout, and an acoustic model of the space shows which before anything is bought.
Questions to ask your maintainer
- Was a listening test done in every zone at the last annual service, and what did it find? It's part of the annual service (BS 5839-8:2023, Clause 40.2 j)).
- Which zones were marked hard to understand?
- Is any loudspeaker in those zones failed, or turned down?
If that doesn't settle it
If you're wary of being sold more loudspeakers, that's fair. Where the room is the limit, we'll say so, and what more hardware can and can't do about it.
Would it be a bad idea to find out whether it's the room or the system before anything is bought?