Biamp Systems, a leading provider of innovative networked media systems, today announced the release of Vocia® 1.7, the newest addition to its award-winning public address and evacuation system. With its decentralized architecture, Vocia is designed with no single point of system failure for reliable public address and paging applications in healthcare, corporate office, convention space and high-volume transportation environments. 

Vocia 1.7 is equipped with new 2RU amplifiers, passive end-of-line monitoring devices (PLDs) supporting a wide range of speakers, as well as enhancements such as live inter-world paging, increased recorded message times of up to 30 minutes, and the flexibility to have multiple Life Safety Interface (LSI-16) devices per world. 

"These latest additions to the Vocia platform unlock increased flexibility of design, leveraging the advantages of Vocia's decentralized architecture," said Shell Haffner, director of product management at Biamp Systems. "Our new amplifiers provide a wider range power options to fit the needs of any size of application, and our new passive end-of-line devices reduce expenses by eliminating power and return cabling requirements. Vocia takes public address and voice evacuation to the next level in both system design and expectations."

The four-channel VA-4300CV and eight-channel VA-8150CV digital networked amplifiers provide power levels of 300 or 150 watts-per-channel respectively, delivering continuous audio power at the wattage needed. The 2RU amplifiers come equipped with comprehensive failover capabilities, including device-to-device and channel-to-channel failover. 

Incorporating the newest Vocia Message Server (MS-1e), Vocia 1.7 also provides improved message playback, event scheduling, a VoIP paging interface, email reporting, logging capabilities, and remote system access. The Text-to-Speech Servers (TTS-1e and TTS-1nce) are networked text-to-speech engines that support the creation of browser-based announcements. TTS-1 devices use Ethernet-based control protocols within a Vocia system to construct a variety of announcements using a set of user-defined templates.

Available in fall 2015, Vocia 1.7 is being showcased at InfoComm 2015 in Orlando, Florida (Booth 743). More information on Biamp's entire portfolio of networked media systems is available at www.biamp.com.