Music On Our Phones by Eddie

25Sep

Yesterday, Stuart “Eddie” Edwards, our Technology Services Manager sent the following email:

I’m very happy to say that we now have music on hold for our office phone system. You might think it was easy to do (seeing as we deal with audio all day long), but it was actually rather complicated.

Anyway, not only have we put station audio on there, we are now able to send whatever audio feed we like to our phone system with just a couple of clicks. Classic Rock on a Tuesday? Xtreme on a Friday? It’s all possible now. (Ooo, look at the Engineer in me getting excited there!)

To which Christian replied this morning:

I can’t help get the feeling reading this you wanted to tell us more about how tricky this was to do - the intricate technical details involved - yet stopped yourself. Please Eddie, tell us, I’m sure there is a One Golden Square Blog in this!

So courtesy Eddie, here’s the details:

You asked for it, sunshine…

Step one : Configure the Cisco Call Manager Express router to take and digitise an unbalanced audio feed from pins three (ring) and six (tip).
Step two : Krone a CAT5e cable onto a Krone block in the CTA and mount it on the frame (B), recording its position, colour codings.

Step Two

Step three : Trace out audio feed from Klotz frames, through the jack-field, to the Krone frame (A).

Step Three

Step four : Krone a red/white (mono) cable between A and B locations.

Step Four

Step five : Run the cable under the CTA floor, observing established cabling routes.

Step Five

Step six : Crimp an RJ45 connector onto the end of the cable and plug it into the router.
Step seven : Write software for the Klotz network to allow the control of the audio feed, and fixed routing points.
Step eight : Reboot the Klotz CTAM master. This is possibly the most scary thing that we could ever do in a technical capacity within this building.

Step Eight

Step nine : Mount the crosspoint in Klotz to route the gain and DSP source to the A/D output in Frame 7, Card 8, Output 3.
Step ten : Fully test on incoming and outgoing calls.

Happy now?

Eddie

[Be sure to let us know if you want more technical posts like this on the blog :-) ]

Categories: Technology
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Posted by adam on September 25, 2009

Comments (14)

  1. Chris Goldson @ September 25, 2009 at 11:23 am | Permalink

    Shame about the obvious spelling mistake Eddie. Shoddy. Very shoddy.

  2. James Cridland @ September 25, 2009 at 12:51 pm | Permalink

    Hmm, interesting way of doing it. But it sounds as if it’s getting studio levels; and nobody wants to listen to studio levels.

    And what happens when you’re in delay - will it be the pre-delay version, complete with libels, PRADEEEEEEEP, and everything?

    I suspect you might wish to try and redo your work after giving the above due consideration; and I’m happy to invoice for this advice.

  3. sebtoast @ September 25, 2009 at 1:36 pm | Permalink

    I love it when someone asks me something like: How hard can doing X be?
    And I just send the same kind of reply and see the looks on their face!

  4. Eddie @ September 25, 2009 at 2:26 pm | Permalink

    Oh, James…

    Did you forget to consider that off air feeds are also presented to Vadis, as well as the internal unprocessed studio feeds?

  5. Adam Reynolds @ September 25, 2009 at 4:10 pm | Permalink

    This is quite possibly the most incredibly boring post I’ve ever had to read.. ever! Thanks for talking us all through this Eddie- what’s next? I think you should give us a step by step guide of the cabling across the whole building?

  6. Alan in Belfast @ September 25, 2009 at 5:24 pm | Permalink

    For all us nerds out there, it was a great post!

    > “observing established cabling routes”

    Irony heavy! Though it did seem remarkably tidy under your floor tiles - if a little more colourful - than I’ve seen under other floors.

  7. palorx @ September 25, 2009 at 9:05 pm | Permalink

    Ooooooooh, yes please ;)

  8. James Cridland @ September 25, 2009 at 9:52 pm | Permalink

    @Eddie - yes. Yes, I did. Wasn’t that Mark Robinson a clever man… (grin)

  9. Peter Griffin (Really) @ September 27, 2009 at 11:12 am | Permalink

    Wow. Impressive.

    I didn’t understand half of what you were saying there eddie, but I can appreciate that it took loads of effort, so good work.

    And, quite apart from what Adam said about, I’d love to guide a step-by-step guide of cabling across the whole building, including MDF schematics and all :P

  10. Marty from new yawk @ September 28, 2009 at 1:32 pm | Permalink

    Eddie, is there a podcast available? If not, why not? You need to have a word with the marketing people.

  11. Drew @ September 29, 2009 at 9:05 am | Permalink

    software writing, rebooting, kroning?? crikey!

    It used to be “run a cable from headphone output of a tuner into the phone system MOH input” where I came from - worked great too!

  12. Jim @ September 30, 2009 at 9:56 pm | Permalink

    More of the same; yes please! :-)

  13. Psychoengineer @ October 1, 2009 at 8:41 pm | Permalink

    Good to see the CTA in lights after all this time.

    Sad though, you could do that before I left, the MOH on the Meridian system you used to have came from vadis and was assignable. I expect a lot of those nice things were removed after I left and replaced with someone elses ideas… no further comment!

    I swear the world goes backwards sometimes…

  14. Dixie Normous @ October 29, 2009 at 11:13 am | Permalink

    I have the IT equivalent of an erection

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