Quiet hospital fire alarm

Hi , all a local hospital had an edwards custom 6500 with voice and telephone that was replaced with a 4100es sad day !the electrician and fire alarm company said they
Would have got it for me had they known . all the conventional devices are left some adaptabels in the mechanical rooms . but the speakers throughout are old edwards ones they look like regular overhead paging speakers but with a ulc stamp , square baffle .the technician said they are tapped at 1/2 watt and reach 85 dba @ 10 feet.
When he went up to the 6th floor to pull the station the first stage came on it was a beep tone . But it was the quietest fire alarm ive ever heard in my life .if a spectralert
Classic is only 85dba then how come they on low volume are 20 times as lou.d these speakers were no louder than a slightly raised voice or a car stereo on medium low
My ears were less than a foot from the speaker but it was still very tollarable how could this be ?

I would check out this article. Also see this presentation on private mode signaling.

From what I can understand, the alarms can be quiet for a few reasons. First, in operating rooms, a loud fire alarm can startle a surgeon. Also, there is no need to notify the occupants since most of them are incapacitated and cannot evacuate anyway without assistance (they might be hooked up to an IV). Therefore, it might only be necessary to notify the nurses by using quiet alarms.

This all depends on the AHJ.

The hospital over here that I have the most knowledge of when it comes to fire alarms is Miriam Hospital. They have Wheelock E70 speaker/strobes and Simplex chimes on 2903-9101 light or strobe plates. I can’t imagine them have loud raucous alarms which could scare some critically ill patients into heart attacks.

Speaking about the Wheelock E70, I’m not sure if it plays a message or if its just a tone.