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Best way to play doorbell sound?


slevittmd

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I have a DoorBird and it’s currently set up to ring the wall mounted and portable C4 touchpads when someone rings the doorbell. It does this very inconsistently, probably something wrong with the driver, but my dealer is looking into it.

However, just the doorbell tone in those two places is not enough. I have distributed audio in most rooms in the ceiling, and a sonos playbar in the master bedroom. I’d like the sound to play through some of those locations, but dealer says that it will have a delay due to amps having to turn on, possibly up to a minute. Any way around this? Keep amps on during the day?

 

 

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The quickest I was able to get the C4 8 zone amps turned on and sound playing through was about 7 seconds. It sounds like you're dealer is relying on auto sense for the amps to turn on. They turn on much faster if you wire a relay from the controller to the trigger in. Or just put a jumper across the trigger and they'll stay on 24/7.

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1 hour ago, slevittmd said:

 

I have a DoorBird and it’s currently set up to ring the wall mounted and portable C4 touchpads when someone rings the doorbell. It does this very inconsistently, probably something wrong with the driver, but my dealer is looking into it.

However, just the doorbell tone in those two places is not enough. I have distributed audio in most rooms in the ceiling, and a sonos playbar in the master bedroom. I’d like the sound to play through some of those locations, but dealer says that it will have a delay due to amps having to turn on, possibly up to a minute. Any way around this? Keep amps on during the day?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Try our DoorBird driver many dealers find it is much more responsive and a few have told us the announcements are triggered much faster.

It's also FREE

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4 hours ago, Gix656 said:

The quickest I was able to get the C4 8 zone amps turned on and sound playing through was about 7 seconds. It sounds like you're dealer is relying on auto sense for the amps to turn on. They turn on much faster if you wire a relay from the controller to the trigger in. Or just put a jumper across the trigger and they'll stay on 24/7.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
 

This intrigues me, but not being that much of an electrical engineer.  How do I put a jumper and where?  Just run wire from where to where?  :-)

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27 minutes ago, Mark LaBelle said:

This intrigues me, but not being that much of an electrical engineer.  How do I put a jumper and where?  Just run wire from where to where?  :-)

This is ONLY if you're using power amps - and note that a lot of the delay has been removed in 2.10 (provided you have advanced audio enabled).

For the power amps, there is a trigger switch and a contact and relay connection. This is used to have full control and feedback using the system to directly control the amps shutting off (removing the delay for the amp to first sense a steady signal). You can force the amps permanently on by instead of wiring the the terminals to an actual relay, wire the the +5v to IN directly. Note that this is NOT a (control4) recommended way of doing it.

Mind you, even if there's a delay- even a delay is better than NOT hearing it.

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I have a Doorbird and an announcement chime going through my Control4 8 zone matrix amp and there is a slight delay, but nowhere near a minute. Probably somewhere in the 5 second range. Not entirely sure if my installer put in a relay or not, but I've never had a huge delay issue so I would at least give it a shot and see how it works before you take more time/cost intensive measures. It's pretty easy (and free) to program an announcement for it in Composer HE (or maybe even When>>Then??) and see what your actual situation is  first. 

 

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I had the same requirement (just play a sound in a remote part of the house).   

Instead of adding this to my C4 setup, I bought a $20 doorbell kit.  Ie wired an old-school doorbell in parallel with my existing doorbell (check if you also need a larger 16vac transformer).

0 delay...

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On 9/23/2017 at 3:55 AM, Gary Leeds UK said:

Save the doorbell sound to favourites within sonos

The you can programme it so it plays on your sound bar when door bell pressed - We have 4 sonos rooms that do that plus

the Touchscreen 

We have no delay on the Sonos

 

How do you do this?  Is this somewhere in the Sonos ap?

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Download a doorbell sound 

Save it to favorites on the sonos 

Go to the C4 Gui - Sonos Endorsed Driver and check you can see the Doorbell in favorites 

Open up programming in HE 

Go to the room that shows doorbell 

open up "on press""

Go to right hand side of HE and find room with sonos in 

Select favorites - You are looking for square which you press and then a box pops up with all your sonos favorites in  

Select doorbell and drag into the middle 

Then select play and drag that into the middle under doorbell  

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  • 7 months later...
On 9/22/2017 at 4:39 PM, annex⁴ said:

Try our DoorBird driver many dealers find it is much more responsive and a few have told us the announcements are triggered much faster.

It's also FREE

Will your driver support video?

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