To be clear, the Commander5 has not been released to my knowledge. This page is where Gentex’s products are listed.
Low frequency sounders generally use speaker hardware because piezos are ineffective at generating square waves at that frequency. For example, the Wheelock MT has a 500 Hz tone that sounds significantly more raspy than a traditional low frequency sounder. If the standard horn and low frequency sounder were to be combined into one product, the entire device would need to use speaker hardware, meaning the standard horn would likely require more current.
Yeah, but I believe either someone else here or in another place said that the 5 supposedly will replace all previous signal serieses that Gentex has at present.
Yeah, but Gentex might just pull it off just the same: we’ll see I guess.
I could be wrong, but I recall seeing a datasheet for the new devices somewhere, showing that they will have the exact same tone selection as the Commander 3 devices, with the addition of temporal 4 support.
That’s likely this one that I actually just found myself, & it gave me quite the pleasant surprise by revealing that the Commander 5 will indeed not only supposedly still have the 2-wire/4-wire selection function that the previous Commanders have had, but that it’ll also have the chime & whoop tones that the Commander 4 was missing! (both of which I was counting on Gentex to do, & it seems as though they have! (now if they could just get them to market finally)
It turns out that those horn strobe models are UL listed. I don’t know if this only happened recently or I never noticed before. It should be noted that Gentex has listed a Chinese-marked version of the GHSLF, so the low frequency sounders might be remaining xenon-based.
Also, it seems that the Commander2 horns will remain in production, since there is no Commander5 remote horn.
Based on this page, it seems that weatherproof devices will likely start with “GW” and speaker strobes will be denoted by “SS.” I don’t know if there will be remote speakers, although there is a remote speaker in the original expo. There will be remote speakers, as they are listed here.
Yeah: that document says that (at the time of its composition anyway, which is unknown) it’s both UL & ULC approved, while CSFM approval is still being done.
Seriously? I don’t know why Gentex would leave such an old series in production just for that when it would be very easy to simply remove the strobe on the Commander 5 horn/strobe to make a remote horn: they already kept the Commander 2-series around when the Commander 3-series came out, but now that the next Commander-series of devices will look quite different from all the previous lines they might as well also include horn models in it so that everything’s consistent! (I suppose there’s a chance that they might debut horn models later however, since some manufacturers have done so when it comes to introducing new product lines)
There is also no remote speaker in the UL listings as far as I can tell, but the expo image above shows a remote speaker. However, the remote speaker is explicitly listed in the descriptions in the expo, but the remote horn is not.
Yeah, though that along with the document are both pre-production/early looks at the Commander 5-series, which might imply that Gentex is still working on the remote horn models. We’ll see I guess like I said.
Nobody has a sound clip. We did, however, find a spec sheet for the new devices which details the new tone selection. It appears to be exactly the same as the Commander 3s, but with added temporal 4 support.
It actually wouldn’t surprise me if the Commander 5-series will sound identical to the serieses before it (why not: if you have good-sounding tones you might as well stick with using them! (as well as for consistency with previous Commander-series devices too of course).
Simplex did release TrueAlert ES LED strobes around 2017, but they are only available as addressable wall-mount devices, and speaker strobes are not available. I think the main motivation was to have a single gang device.
Not at the moment: some time last year Gentex first unveiled the Commander 5-series at a trade show (which the first post of this topic goes into detail about), & as I discovered at some point between then & now they posted a draft of the datasheet for it, but as for when they’ll actually get to market, who knows honestly at this point.