We have a customer that wants her door phone to ring through her whole house audio when someone's at the door. We can't get it to work, and there is a part connected that we don't know what it is. Here is the setup.

Door phone connects to a Panasonic KSU phone system, there is a phone line running from Ext. 22 on the KSU to the unknown device. Unknown device has a transformer and an RJ-45 cable going to the Elan Z600 connected to Door Bell 1. We have the whole house audio going into the Elan and looping out to a Big Bang amp. We still have sound on all speakers in the house, and the door phone rings the regular telephones when you press the button, but it's not interupting the audio.

Does this seem to be connected correctly? What is the unknown device? It's two circuit board connected together and has "Audiotronix" written on it, I think. We assume it's blown because there is a red LED on one of the boards that we assume is a power light, but it doesn't light up when we put power to it.

Don't know about the audiotronics piece, but it is possible that the ksu is programmed not to ring on extension 22.

Well, I've only been working with Sound Design for a week, so I don't know everything that was done with this job, but they said that it was working fine before. Don't know what happened to make it not work. But I was looking at the owner's manual on the elan website and it said that the z600 has to be installed before any other phone lines, so maybe take service feed into elan and loop back out to the ksu? I think i did this once and I got a different dial tone, and the manual says that there is a different dial tone. But the other guy said that wasn't right. Think I'll try it again.

typically you would run the CO line into the z600 first then into the KSU, the problem being when using a digital telephone system would be you probably are not going to get a double ring or whatever the z600 puts out, digital systems sense the ring on the line and do "the panasonic ring". Oh so technical... there may be work arounds for this, but just in case you may run into that...

I could be wrong about this but from your description, this is a volume control setup??
the z600 has a trigger output to turn the preamp into mute mode, and sends a doorbell tone out, im not so sure how you are going about this with a z600 and an amplifier, is there a z630 or s12 or any other preamp?

Derek

You and Randy should call me Monday. He knows the number.

Fred

Derek, sounds to me like you might need to make some front panel adjustments. Under the lexan strip on the left side. Peel it back carefully. The settings and how to make adjustments are in the manual. Also, as far as the different dial tone or Elan dial tone, it MUST be there. It means the system is working and it is required by law. I would remove the unknown device and test the system without it. Put the Panasonic Phone system after the Z600 and make sure you hear the Elan dial tone. If you can't hear it, the paging functions will not work. The Z600 will work with any existing phone system (supposedly). The only thing to put in front of the Z600 is fax machine, modem and caller ID boxes. Generaly those items work ok behind a Z600 but Elan recommends putting them in front. One last thing I'd say, only because it's so easy to overlook and that is, pay attention to the REN value. Any kind of equipment that plugs into the phone line will have a Ringer Equivalency Number. Add up the numbers from all the equipment. It must not exceed 5 on a single phone line or intermitten ringing or no ringing at all and possibly other weird stuff will happen. The Z600 itself has a REN of 1.1, my phone right here has a REN of 0.76. So you see, you can reach 5 pretty quick.

Good luck

Derek, I got some more info on your issue.
It appears that Panasonic phone systems don't play nice with the Elan Z600.
But if you say that it was working and now it's not, my guess would be that what ever that black box is, is probably the reason.
Also, if there was a power outage recently maybe the presets or the programming got lost in the ksu system.

BUT, absolute bottom line, you MUST have the Elan dial tone for that feature to work.