Thank you Greg. Do you know of such a box to “answer”?
Just an FYI. If you do decide to go with a paging adapter I’ve had good luck with Cyberdata. Very simple to setup especially if you are using FreePBX Endpoint Manager. https://www.cyberdata.net/products/011233
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The Merlin had an audio output for paging. Just essentially a “Speaker out”.
So did the NEC 48’s and 96’s…
That being said, honestly, if you have room in the box, drop in a sound card.
This article on setting up a sound card for paging on asterisk… should start you in the right direction.
(My reasoning for this: A sound card is $15-20… a new amplifier is quite a bit more… a paging module is going to be some bucks… if there’s room in the box, try a sound card.)
I missed that, thanks. Time to scour Ebay, or go a different route. Thank you for your help.
Sidenote - I just registered today on this site, and cannot reply anymore. But I wanted to thank Greg and Dave, and necits2015 - a paging adapter might be the cleanest option and yes, I’m using Endpoint Manager so that would help as well. Greg, I’m going to look into the soundcard option as well.
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All that being said, here are some options:
o Sound card – take output to amplifier.
o Paging Module – VOIP module that has audio output to amplifier, program as extension (This could be a nice solution especially if you wanted to also stream audio through your PA…)
o Changing Amplifier: As long as it’s a 70v system, it should work with your speakers. Make sure it’s at least 100 watts.
o Sacrifice phone – Take a phone, snag the audio off of it into the amplifier (see, I’d probably do this, but I am a bit of a techno-weenie)
o See if you have a TPI-100 (Probably not, since it was a merlin system it had just audio out)
o See if you can find a TPI-100
… and just for giggles, look on the back of your PBX and see if it has a speaker output (meaning it has a built-in sound card)
I went through this exact same problem. My old PBX used a “Paging Port” to connect to our valcom amp. In my case the Valcom was looking for an FXO port, but I couldn’t figure how to set that up properly. I had ordered 3 extra phones, so I took one of the extra phones and connected the internal speaker to the amp. If I didn’t have the extra phone lying around I would have purchased a proper paging adapter.
If your old PBX was a Merlin Magix you were probably using a trunk port which would be an FXO port. The Merlin Legend and Magix used a trunk port and you just programmed it to be the page port so the system knew what trunk to take off hook when the page code was entered.
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I ended up buying a Cyberdata Paging Adapter, working like a champ.
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Support is also top notch. Had an issue with POE and had the unit replaced within a week at no charge.
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