Could You.......

[thunderbeam63]

Could you play a song on an electric siren besides westminister?

Highly dependent on the audio processing circuitry and the compression drivers in the siren itself.

You just can't upload your favourite gangsta' song to a siren and expect it to play,

You, my friend, have won the award for funniest thing I read.

[Jim_Ferer]

Think of how far sound storage has come since the first electronic sirens appeared. Getting more sounds with a siren was a big-time extra cost option that probably involved whole new circuit cards or something. Now a $30 SD card can hold beaucoup sound samples and many pre-recorded messages.

I've heard voice over a siren and I think it's badly oversold. They're loud enough but understanding them is a whole different matter. Between distortion and echoes getting the message is very hit or miss.

[Hacksaw]

Well, like the Federal guy here said, the idea of a voice announcement sounding like "A Divine voice from Heaven" is just not possible. It gets worse when some places buy the biggest voice capable systems & hope it reaches everyone vs. a number of smaller units spread out.

[mgear]

What about at car dealers they play music over their loudspeakers its mostly 80's pop but it still plays.

Thats an entirely different speaker/system.

It's still a driver system.

[Gil]

What about at car dealers they play music over their loudspeakers its mostly 80's pop but it still plays.

Thats an entirely different speaker/system.

It's still a driver system.

Different kind of drivers............

[Robert Gift]

Anything capable of broadcasting voice, the waveforms of which are far more complex than music, can also reproduce music.
The bass response will be very poor. These systems also likely have a low frequency cut-off circuit to prevent speaker driver coil burnout below 500 Hz or something.

[Justin]

It's still a driver system.

Not the tweeters or sub-woofers you can get off the shelf.

These drivers are high performance compression drivers designed for high sound pressure output levels between certain frequencies. Going into the bass and ultrasonic frequencies will do damage to the coils and most likely burn out or short the entire system out, given the right conditions.

These systems also likely have a low frequency cut-off circuit to prevent speaker driver coil burnout below 500 Hz or something.

You would hope and think so. Maybe that's why the the drivers in the ATI sirens are known to fail...

[mgear]

Ati hmm.

[Rory Buszka]

Hi, all. Perhaps I can offer some insight into this discussion. The drivers used in Whelen sirens have a significantly higher compression ratio than a typical high-frequency, mid-frequency, or paging compression driver. This compression ratio is so high, in fact, that at full power the throat of the horn is actually overloaded, generating up to 10% THD. So, that's why voice and audio from siren drivers usually doesn't sound so great. The important thing is to be loud, though, which the Whelen siren drivers accomplish better than any other siren driver out there. The Whelen drivers also have a significantly larger diaphragm than any other siren driver (with the exception of the Community M4, which is used in some outdoor voice paging systems).

[Robert Gift]

Doesn't the voice feature operate at lower output?