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Post by Deleted on Apr 6, 2011 18:01:13 GMT
There have been a lot of complaints from people living near Canonbury station about the excessive volume of Tannoy (PA) announcements. They can be clearly heard in homes quite a way from the station - even when all the windows are shut. LOROL advise that the PA system is "of a new type", being "complex" and it is not easy to adjust the volume! It operates on a "zonal basis" according to ambient sound levels within each zone, and adapts automatically to local variations such as a train being in a platform, or local temperature and wind conditions. In addition there are different systems for "automatic train announcements", "Local PA", "Control PA" and each would need seperate adjustments. There seems to be 3 announcements for each train, these being 1. "the next train to arrive will be...." , 2 "the train approaching is.... 3. The train now standing is.... This happens on 4 platforms, with trains at peak arriving every 8 minutes per platform. LOROL do need to work with the system engineers to work out how to control the volume of station announcements - especially at open air stations near to residential properties. Anyone else experienced similar at other stations?
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Post by railtechnician on Apr 6, 2011 18:41:41 GMT
There have been a lot of complaints from people living near Canonbury station about the excessive volume of Tannoy (PA) announcements. They can be clearly heard in homes quite a way from the station - even when all the windows are shut. LOROL advise that the PA system is "of a new type", being "complex" and it is not easy to adjust the volume! It operates on a "zonal basis" according to ambient sound levels within each zone, and adapts automatically to local variations such as a train being in a platform, or local temperature and wind conditions. In addition there are different systems for "automatic train announcements", "Local PA", "Control PA" and each would need seperate adjustments. There seems to be 3 announcements for each train, these being 1. "the next train to arrive will be...." , 2 "the train approaching is.... 3. The train now standing is.... This happens on 4 platforms, with trains at peak arriving every 8 minutes per platform. LOROL do need to work with the system engineers to work out how to control the volume of station announcements - especially at open air stations near to residential properties. Anyone else experienced similar at other stations? The residents will usually win if they seek advice from the local council. LUL has many sites where noise abatement has been an issue. This has resulted in disconnection of individual speakers or parts of speaker chains and in some places restrictions on the times that announcements can be made without incurring some form of penalty. Baker Street and Queensbury are two sites that spring readily to mind from the 1990s. In general terms announcements to zoned apeaker chains originating at different announcement points use different pre-amplifiers. Add to this the distance that a user's mouth is from the microphone, the type of microphone, the variation in speaking tone and softness/loudness/pitch etc and you have an impossible set of variables to equalise! Been there, done that, got the T-shirt with LUL PA systems over many years, set a station up one day tuning to local and remote announcements only to find that different staff bring with them a unique voice on the next day. One of the reasons that remote PA lineups were such a challenge was the differing length of line to each site, requiring different amplification and equalisation at each site but there is no perfect system unless the variables can be fixed and they can't to any satisfactory degree unless someone can find a perfect announcer and clone him or her! Of course local conditions are a separate set of variables that also come into play. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 9, 2011 9:58:19 GMT
Following a Freedom of Information request, I received the following information from
the "Infrastructure Communications Executive" of TfL London Rail,.
"We held a meeting on Tuesday (5th April) to address the issue which was attended by
LOROL, who manage the London Overground and stations, and by Transport for
London staff, myself included. Some of the system engineers were also in
attendance and we were able to more more clearly establish how and why the
system works as it does. At this stage, I can advise you that work was
undertaken at the station on Friday, 1 April and was reset by LOROL’s
maintainers from its previous lower volume, resulting in the very loud
announcements throughout the weekend of 2 and 3 April. Work was
undertaken on the system this week and the volume level has now been reset
to a flat +50db during the day (0700-1900 hours), +40db at night
(1900-0700 hours) and to +30db at weekends. For your information and to
provide some persepctive, +50db is regarded as equivalent to a the noise
of an average home.
We are also exploring how to reduce the number of announcements
broadcast. As you would be aware, there are three announcements per
train and are based on published Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 2005
compliant guidelines. We are exploring the possibility of removing at
least one message and the remainder shortened (at present they list all
the calling stations individually we may be able to simply shorten that
considerably to, for example, “calling at all stations to West
Croydon")."
This seems very helpful and has hopefully addressed the issue.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2011 14:14:37 GMT
In contrast, the new announcements at Hackney Central are very quiet, barely audible in my experience.
I also think that listing the calling stations when the train is already in the station is a bit pointless, because in a large number of cases (i.e. when there are lots of stations left to call at) the calling stations are still being announced by the time the train has already left!
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Post by edwardfox on Apr 10, 2011 16:17:19 GMT
Perhaps the simplest and least expensive solution is to take affected stations out of the PA loop and place a poster - explaining why - at the entrance to the station and the entrance to each platform.  |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2011 20:01:56 GMT
The problem with having a poster is that people with impaired vision, who are likely to find the announcements very helpful, may well be unable to read/see said poster. There would need to be an announcement to say that there will be no announcements! It's just one of those cases where you can't please everybody.
I don't know the exact circumstances/equipment in use at Canonbury but it many be possible to install very high directivity speakers to reduce the problem but this would obviously be very expensive.
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