M1 as Doorbell

Robolo has a post going on about the same thing right now Here: with a link to what IVB did...

I'm not really going for the zoned approach (though I do like the idea - I'm up in the air about putting a speaker in the garage or in the back yard for doorbells and critical alerts without having everything going on with the system audible by the neighbors)...

My bigger question though, is what's with the resistors and Capacitors? Is that to prevent popping? And, is it required if I have all the speakers as one "zone" and use a relay so that at rest, the speakers are connected to the elk, but on trigger they switch to the Elk124 and play the sounds? Looking at the diagram I couldn't tell if both sources were always connected to the speakers or if IVB was switching them.

I meant to order the stuff last weekend but forgot... hopefully I can get ordered today so I'll have my stuff in for next weekend... Also, if anyone has any good sources of WAV files, I'd love to see that too. I need a westminister chime, phone ringers, and various sounds which will likely replace the built-in Elk door chimes so we can distinguish which door by what the chime sounded like (and possibly leave less-used zones on voice).
 
I'll abandon my other post and add my experiences here. I was really suprised to find very little information on the best way to connect speakers to the M1 and ELK-120. Even the Elk web site was not helpful about how to do this. Maybe everyone is just using a mixer?

Anyway, last night I hooked up the Elk-120 (with a little chat-room help from electron) for the first time and simply plugged the 120 speaker output into the M1's output #1 terminals which already had all the speakers connected to it. In other words connected both the Elk M1 and the Elk 120 in parallel to the speakers. Everything seems to be working just fine without any capacitors or resistors.

ToddB, check earlier in this thread for a link to doorbell chime files. I was able to play them on my PC speakers and record them through the on-board mic of the Elk-120 with sufficient clarity that I didn't need the Elk-129 (Computer sound card interface)

robolo
 
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