New System Question

There is a school opened this year with a Simplex 4100U that has TrueAlerts throughout the school, smokes, and pulls.
In the gym, though, there is one of those Wheelock 4-speaker arrays on the ceiling and a 4100U Fire Control box with a mic and a button panel with different messages on it. If the school’s system is horn/strobes, why would the gym have a fire alarm speaker system? Also note the gym also has horn/strobes and its own PA System for the stage. Another note is I noticed the annunciators in the lobbies have a button labeled PRIORITY 2 ACK. What could that be for, or do all 4603 annunciators have that?

They probably installed it for during games when there’s an expected large crowd capacity and they felt that evac may be necessary, although, I don’t get why they didn’t just install the speakers instead of speakers AND horns.

Also, yes, all 4603 annunciators have the priority 2 indicator, although it’s not used a whole lot.

I was guessing that maybe it’s so they can make announcements or something if the gym were to be used as a storm shelter or something.

I agree with Dan. Voice is often used in places of large public assembly.

I’ve seen this setup before in auditoriums and cafeterias. In some areas, voice evac is required where expected occupancy reaches a certain threshold.

That’s right. I know a couple places like this:

In the local Boys & Girls Club where I worked at for a while back in 2006, they had a Notifier NFS-640 voice-evacuation system, but only the gym had voice-evac (Wheelock E70 speaker/strobes). The rest was all horns (Wheelock NS horn/strobes and a couple of MT-24-LSMs in the mix).

At Boyden Hall, over at Bridgewater State University, the auditorium was renovated in 2008. Prior to the renovation, I believe the auditorium had Simplex 4051+4050-85 horn/lights, like the rest of the building did. But now it has TrueAlert speaker/strobes, and addressable dual-action Simplex pulls and TrueAlarm smoke detectors, while the rest of the building still uses 4051+4050-85 horn/lights, 4251-20 pulls and conventional detectors. The main fire alarm panel is a Simplex 4100, installed in the early 2000s to replace a 2001, and it did not have voice-evacuation built in, so they installed a 4003 voice control panel outside the auditorium to work the speaker/strobes.