They aren’t prohibitively expensive though. Your security system, controls system, IT infrastructure etc. is going to cost considerably more and need constant updates. Can you put a price on reliability? When 17 dealers each do part of a system in a building and it becomes one confusing spaghetti mess and you have to have an engineer to come in and document the entire system and find any faults to pass an inspection, your cost just surpassed using Simplex, Siemens, or to a lesser extent EST in the first place. They might be overkill for an Applebees, but when you’re looking at high rise voice system there’s no way I’d go any other route.
MXL can drive suppression, has multiple voice channels, and has peer to peer paging. The last two seem trivial but for some reason are difficult for fire alarm panels still. :roll: I’m not sure of the node/device count but both systems can be massive, the MXL has been installed in giant applications and is tried and proven though. All that from a system that came out in the early 90s, it took Gamewell until 2006 to finally catch up to a panel that was already replaced and being phased out. There’s nothing wrong with the devices either, they’re simply quarter of a century year old technology and I can’t think of any devices of the same era that were any better.
There’s no way I’d want to mess with an MXL these days, but it’s a solid system from it’s era in my opinion.
