Play sound via Elk speakers?

[IVB]

Is it possible to play a pre-determined sound via the Elk speakers? For example, if the doorbell rings, play a doorbell sound. If the telephone rings, play a telephone sound.

The way I could use this is in my "naptime/DND" setting, where I set all phones to not ring, disable the doorbell chime, and play that sound through the Elk.

I looked in the Rules section of ElkRP, couldn't find anything.

 

[WayneW]

AFAIK, the M1 doesn't have any "sounds" stored, just words. You could record your own sounds into the custom voice area.

 

[IVB]

Got it. Just realized there's that Elk-120 and Elk-124, as well as the Elk-129 downloadable WAV thingey. Dang, there's always just one more cool gadget to buy with this thing.

1) I'm trying to understand how all this gets wired up. I'll have 4 speakers total. Do they get wired to the Elk mainboard, or the the 120/124?

2) Is the only difference bet the 120 & 124 in the # of discrete channels they can record? They both have 24W, 4Ohm load. I can imagine using the speakers to record just the doorbell/telephone sounds currently, so getting the 120 with 4 sounds should be enough for me.

3) Given that they have a min 4 Ohm impedance, what would I need to drive 4 speakers? Can I just use something like a $20 impedance matching VC to drive up impedance and run all 4 off a single unit?

 

[Sandpiper]

3) Given that they have a min 4 Ohm impedance, what would I need to drive 4 speakers? Can I just use something like a $20 impedance matching VC to drive up impedance and run all 4 off a single unit?

Wire the four in series/parallel, i.e. two in series, another two in series, then parallel the two sets of two. For 8 ohm speakers, this will result in a combination of 8 ohms. The two series speakers net 16 ohms each, then when put in parallel, you get 8 ohms back again.

 

[toymaster458]

From talking with IVB before regarding speakers he also wants them switchable so he can turn on or off selected rooms. So wiring them in series won't work. If they are all wired in parallel then it will bring the total ohms to 2 if they are all turned on. I suggested wiring 2 in parallel of OutPut 1 then install a ELK-800 for the other 2 in parallel. That way no matter which ones are on or off he will never be above 8 ohms or below 4 ohms.

 

[3DogKnight]

IVB,

How did you end up hooking this up? I have the ELK-930 (Doorbell & Telephone Ring Detector), but I wanted to put in some custom sounds (like .wav files) to output when someone presses the doorbell button. What other device do I need to get the custom sounds?

 

[IVB]

I'm going to get toymaster to confirm, as he's guiding me [heck, half-designing] on my whole setup. I'm going to hold off on putting the order in until I get my Elk working correctly with the 30 sensors I already bought. Hopefully I can do that within a few weeks, but as I've just found out as per the other thread, I didn't do the setup correctly the first time, so I'd best take my time to learn a wee bit more before tackling anything new.

In the end, I believe we're going to go with an
- Elk-800 amplifier,
- 4 of the cheap speakers,
- perhaps a few relays as I want to have the ability to put them in "zones" so I can turn on/off [i.e., if we're in the backyard, i want a speaker back there so we hear the doorbell]
- Elk-120 or 124, so I can have sounds
- that pc-interface module, so I can import custom .wav files. Perhaps a screaming doorbell on halloween

Toymaster - was that it? Did I overstate or understate anything?