By Healthcare Facilities Today

AMSTERDAM, ISE 2014 — Biamp Systems, a leading provider of innovative, networked media systems, recently announced the launch of Vocia® 1.6, a significant addition to the company's networked public address and voice evacuation system. Vocia 1.6 provides three new hardware devices — the eight-channel Vocia Input (VI-8) for analog and digital paging inputs, the VoIP-1 telephone-paging adaptor, and the POTS-1 analog telephone-paging adaptor. A large number of new features and enhancements in Vocia 1.6 software include impedance monitoring for the Vocia VA-8600 amplifier, support for unicast CobraNet® local inputs, and a dry contact control input mode for Vocia Life Safety Interface (LSI-16e), VI-8, and Vocia General Purpose I/O (GPIO-1) devices. 

"Vocia 1.6 introduces new components and features to extend our industry-leading platform to an even broader range of installations of varying sizes, while bringing our Vocia and Tesira platforms closer together as an integrated solution for flexible, multi-functional environments," said Graeme Harrison, Executive Vice President of Marketing, Biamp Systems. "Vocia 1.6 delivers the flexibility within a system to integrate paging directly with both VoIP and analog telephone systems."

Supporting up to eight analog or CobraNet paging audio inputs, the new Vocia VI-8 input device rapidly routes signals to any assigned page code. Expanding the interoperability of the Biamp® product line, the VI-8 accepts paging audio inputs from Audia® and Tesira® systems, and can be used in conjunction with monitored Vocia GPIO-1 devices for fire panel supervision and priority for emergency pages. Designed to interface with existing paging stations, the VI-8 is ideal for large venues such as airports, convention centers, and healthcare campuses.

The Vocia VoIP-1 is a simple VoIP telephone-paging adapter, and the POTS-1 is an analog telephone-paging adapter. Both are ideal for installations in smaller hospitals and industrial environments, or those that require a simple VoIP or POTS extension capability. Both the VoIP-1 and POTS-1 enable live paging as well as store and forward to assigned page codes within any Vocia installation. The units support two lines with an option to support four lines by ordering the units with an expansion card.

In addition to Vocia's current End of Line (ELD-1) device, Vocia 1.6 provides the VA-8600 amplifier as an additional way to monitor speaker line health via impedance monitoring. This makes Vocia ideal for installations in which the speaker infrastructure is already in place. Additionally, Unicast CobraNet inputs from both Audia and Tesira systems can be directly routed to Vocia amplifiers, allowing an increased number of background sources to access any one area without affecting the number of simultaneous pages that are possible.

Vocia 1.6 will be available in June 2014. More information on Biamp's full line of audio solutions is available at www.biamp.com.