My new apartment building has SpectrAlert Advances in the hallways, but in the units themselves, there are PA400 mini-horns in beige.
This was a rather interesting mashup for me to see, but then I remembered that the Advance mini-horns were probably not introduced until a few years after that date. The building was renovated in 2007. Does anyone know when that mini-horn introduced to the market? Has anyone seen such an Advance/PA400 combination in a building before?
I don’t know the exact date the mini horns came out, however the Advance series was introduced in 2006. I think the mini horns came out a while after that, so given the reno date of 2007, it’s possible that building fell right in the middle of the new horn/strobes, but pre-Advanced mini horn. Kind of a unique system there.
It looks like they were indeed introduced in 2007. The September/October 2007 issue of the NFPA Journal showcases these mini-horns as a new product (at p. 104).
I’ve come across a similar situation at a high-rise hotel/condo/art gallery complex near my house. The building was completed in 2018 and has a mix of SpectrAlert Advance and L-Series speaker/strobes and speakers; in some cases, both series of devices are used within the same room.