Zones, rack, wiring, reports and handover

Welcome to lesson three. The speakers are placed and the coverage is right, so now we turn a drawing into a system that someone can quote, build and hand over. That means zones, amplifiers, the rack, the wiring, and the documents. Zones is the first stop. The top section lists the amplifier units in the project. You can add one from the amplifier library, or let Auto-assign create and assign amplifiers from the speakers you've placed, which is what the sample has done with two LEA units.

Below that, every area has become a zone. Each zone has a source, a level, and a wiring mode, single or parallel. And the last column assigns the zone to an amplifier channel, showing how many channels are still free. You can add a custom zone for a space that isn't a room, like a corridor that shares speakers with the lobby.

The same page handles the shared audio equipment. The audio equipment section is where the matrix, the players and the processors live, with a quantity and an Add button. Each unit shows where it's installed. Click it to switch between the rack and a room, because a player behind the bar is wired differently from a player in the rack. Get this right here, and the rack and the wiring follow without any extra work.

Back in the Plan, the Results tab has a group called Amplifier and wiring, and it's per area. Low Z, seventy volt and one hundred volt choose how the speakers in this area are connected. Low impedance is the default for a small room with a few speakers. Seventy or one hundred volt line is for long runs and many speakers, like a corridor, and the speakers need a tap transformer for it.

Cable run is the estimated length to the rack. The group then tells you how many channels this area needs, how much power each channel must deliver, which amplifier it's assigned to, and the cable size it recommends. If the cable run is long, it'll tell you when a thicker cable is needed to keep the loss down.

Now the rack. On the left, the devices from this project, each with its height in rack units. Below them, generic items like a patch panel, a power distribution unit and blank panels. The rack size is set at the top: units, width and depth. Auto-fill from project lays the whole thing out in one go, in the order an installer would choose: patch panels at the top, the controller and the network gear in the middle, amplifiers at the bottom with ventilation gaps between them, and a PDU.

Drag any item to change the order. Every device has a front panel image, and you can upload your own for a model that doesn't have one, so the elevation looks like the real rack. The power budget at the bottom adds up the draw of everything inside.

Rear shows the back of the same rack. The mains voltage is set here, two hundred and thirty volts for the UAE, and the PDU outlets are allocated to the devices. Below the elevation is a cable and port schedule, one row per connection, with the port on each end. This is the page the installer uses to patch the rack, so it's worth a look before you send the drawings.

Wiring is the connection drawing, and there are three views. The schematic is the technical one. Each device is drawn with its real rear panel connectors, taken from the manufacturer's data, and every cable is a line from one port to another. Arrange locations groups the devices by where they're installed, and the zoom controls let you follow a single cable. Update from project rebuilds the drawing after you change the design. Cable colours is the legend: speaker cable, network, HDMI and so on each have their own colour.

Show schedule puts the cable list next to the drawing. Every cable has an ID, a source device and port, a destination device and port, and a type. Those IDs are printed in the report and on the room sheets, so the installer can label both ends of a cable before it goes into the wall, and the commissioning engineer can find it again a year later.

The system diagram is the client-facing version. Devices are boxes with their product photos, grouped by location, and the connections show the relationships rather than the individual ports. Arrange tidies the layout, and you can upload a photo for a device that doesn't have one. This is the drawing that goes into the proposal, because a client can read it without knowing what a balanced input is.

Room sheets group the installation by location. One section per room, plus one for the shared equipment in the rack. Each device card shows its connections and the cable IDs. Each room can be exported as its own PDF or image, which is useful for a site crew that only needs the sheet for the room they're working in. And if a connection can't be resolved, it's flagged here for review rather than silently left off.

The Export menu is where the deliverables come from. There are two CAD exports and they're different. Floor plan DXF is the building drawing, with the areas, the walls and the device positions, and if the project has a PDF or image background, it downloads as a zip with the background image alongside, so it opens in AutoCAD with the plan underneath. Wiring DXF is the connection diagram. Keep the two straight and send the right one to the right person. The BOM goes out as CSV, and Prepare reports opens the report workspace.

This is the report workspace. Instead of downloading a PDF and hoping, you choose a package, choose the introductions you want on each section, and generate a preview that you can read page by page before anything leaves your machine. The packages cover the audio design, the network, the cameras, the video and control systems, the rack and the wiring. You can issue them separately, or as one combined document with a contents page.

Here's a preview. The section menu jumps to any drawing or schedule, and fit page or fit width changes how you read it. The audio section has the plan with the heatmap, a 3D view of each area, the engineering figures from lesson two, the equipment, and the QR code that opens the client's 3D tour on a phone. Read the actual pages. If an area has no devices, it's left out automatically so the report never has an empty page. And when you're happy, download. The PDF is the deliverable, the project file is the editable design, and you keep both.

Project details, in the Project menu, is where the names on the cover come from: the project name, the client, the date and the revision. The project name is also editable in the top bar. Set these before you export, because a report with revision A and a client's name on it reads very differently from one that says New Project.

Review design is a checklist that runs across the whole project before you present it. It counts what needs attention, what's advisory, and what's passed. In the sample it has found a connection with a missing port, with a button that takes you straight to the wiring to fix it, and it's flagged that the in-ceiling speakers don't reach low enough for full range music in three areas, with the suggestion to add a subwoofer.

You can filter by floor and by category, and refresh the checks after you've made changes. I'd run it before every export. It catches the things a client would notice.

The Equipment tab in the Inspector is the project inventory. It can show the current area or the whole project, by discipline, and it ends with the total bill of materials. Match against the catalogue lines up every item with the dealer portal, so the BOM carries your dealer prices. Export writes it out, and from the proposal you can send the whole list to your cart in the portal to order it. That's the quote to order path: design, review, price, order, without retyping a single model number.

Client handover is a tab in the project workspace, the same window as the visual history. It records who the package is for, the revision, who prepared it, an overview for the cover, and installation notes. Then you tick what goes in the package: the floor plans with device locations, the room wiring sheets, and the equipment and cable schedules as CSV. Save, and the details flow onto the documents.

Finally, Site tracking follows the design through the installation. Every device and every cable is an item with a status: not checked, installed, verified, or needs attention. You record who checked it and when, and for an area you can type the measured level, the measured STI and the measured reverberation time from commissioning, next to what the tool predicted.

Export commissioning CSV gives you the record for the client's file. It's the part of the job that proves the design did what it said. That's the system. Lesson four looks at the other four disciplines: Wi-Fi, cameras, video distribution and control, on the same plan.