Project Outline
The Premier Foods site in Worksop is a food production factory facility producing a wide range of family favorite food items such as OXO, Bisto, Homepride, SAXA and more. This a large site comprising numerous production buildings, logistics, warehousing and support / office buildings.
Working directly with the site through the local maintenance and engineering team, we were contracted to design and install a radio based music system (BGM) and Public Address system (PA / Tannoy) for use throughout the main factory production areas.
Audio Applications
- Background Music (BGM) – Radio Based
- Public Address (PA) / Tannoy
- Mass Notification
Audio Specification & Technologies
- 100v line, high impedance
- IP / SIP interface for telephony PA / announcements
Installation Details
The food production areas of this site presented a number of audio design and practical installation challenges:
- High ambient background noise.
- ‘Open product’ production.
- Limited access.
These challenges were not unique and were somewhat expected. Having previously installed sound systems into many similar factory and food production projects these challenges were discussed with the client and supporting project teams, with a number of provisioning and protective measures put in place to assist the installation whilst mitigating possible contamination of the food product.
Given the relative high audio ‘power’ requirements for this project, our design solution was somewhat dictated. 100v line, high impedance audio was specified and installed to provide robust and powerful quality audio transmission over long distance cable runs. Multiple audio zones were created. These provided targeted audio with separate volume control to the different production areas. Supporting multi-power amplifiers based on these zones were installed – providing resilience, should any one speaker zone fail, it wouldn’t affect another speaker zone.
The high ambient background noise for the production activities was a significant challenge that presented competitively to any audio generated from the project audio system. This noise competition is outside of our control to reduce or control. In some instances, extremely high ambient areas, it was simply not possible nor sensible to add further audio. However, for the vast majority of the production areas we were able to strategically identify and install loud speakers close to staff work stations and activity areas, increasing overall audio and sound quality.
An IP / SIP telephony interface unit was installed to enable priority user announcement (mute music / radio). This capability was particularly useful to the production management, maintenance and engineering team to help identify production line issues and co-ordinate issues / fixes.
