Walk the service corridors of a hotel and you will find the audio system where it has always been: a rack of amplifiers in a riser room, kilometres of loudspeaker cable running to every corridor, lobby, restaurant and pool deck, and a transformer tap setting on every ceiling speaker that someone has to get right on a ladder. It works. It is also the most expensive way to put background music in a building that already has a network socket in every room.
The hotel already runs a network. Every guest room, every meeting room, every corridor access point and every point-of-sale terminal sits on a structured cabling system that was designed, certified and documented when the building went up. Power over Ethernet uses that same cabling to carry DC power alongside the data, which is how the hotel's wireless access points, IP phones and door controllers are powered today. A loudspeaker can be powered the same way.
A PoE loudspeaker has the amplifier and the signal processing inside the cabinet. One RJ45 socket on the back takes a single Cat cable from a PoE switch. Down that cable come three things: the audio, as a Dante stream; the power, under the IEEE 802.3 PoE standards; and the control, so the system can be monitored and adjusted from the network. There is no amplifier rack because every loudspeaker carries its own amplifier. There is no loudspeaker cable because the Cat cable is the loudspeaker cable. There is no mains outlet at the ceiling because the switch supplies the power.
For a hotel the consequences are practical. Zoning becomes a routing decision in software rather than a wiring decision in a rack: the restaurant, the lobby, the spa and the ballroom foyer each take their own Dante stream, and a zone can be re-drawn without an electrician. Commissioning is done from a laptop, with each loudspeaker reporting its status and temperature back to the integrator. A failed unit shows up on the network before a guest notices it. And because the audio travels as data, the same network carries it to a new wing or a refurbished floor with nothing more than a patch lead and a PoE port.
The standards matter when you specify the switch. IEEE 802.3af (PoE) delivers up to 15.4 W per port, 802.3at (PoE+) up to 30 W, and 802.3bt (PoE++) up to 60 W or 90 W. Our network loudspeakers accept all three, and we size the switch budget to PoE+ or PoE++ ports so the built-in amplifier has its full headroom for foreground music. Alongside Dante they are AES67 compliant, so they interoperate with other AES67 audio-over-IP systems, and their control runs over AES70.
The SSOUNDS CL6HD and CL8HD are the ceiling loudspeakers of this family: a two-way 6.5 inch or 8 inch in-ceiling speaker with a built-in Class D amplifier and DSP, 90 by 90 degree coverage, and a single RJ45 on the back for Dante audio, PoE power and control. The CL6HD reaches 112 dB and runs from 80 Hz, the CL8HD 113 dB from 70 Hz, which covers corridors, restaurants, lobbies and guest lounges from the ceiling with no visible equipment at all. Read the CL6HD and CL8HD pages for the full data.
Where the room asks for a loudspeaker on the wall rather than in the ceiling, the LC4.3D and LC8.3D are self-powered column arrays on the same single cable: four or eight 3 inch drivers that keep the sound on the listeners in a reverberant ballroom foyer or conference floor. And for a meeting room or boardroom that needs a full-range box, the M-10D is a 10 inch two-way loudspeaker that reaches 51 Hz from one Cat cable.
A PoE audio system is not the answer to every room in a hotel. A ballroom with a live band, a nightclub floor or a large outdoor event space still wants a high-output system with its own amplification, and we design those too. But for the distributed audio that runs all day in every public space, the network the hotel already owns is the best loudspeaker cable it will ever install.
If you are planning a new hotel or refurbishing one, talk to our engineers about a network audio design, or book a demo and hear a PoE loudspeaker running from a single cable.