Sirens Vs Speakers

Hey, guys. Hayden here again from Alarm System Store. And today, we're going to be doing a short overview of the difference between using sirens with an alarm system and using speakers with an alarm system. So there are multiple ways you can hook up either sirens or speakers to your alarm system. Most systems nowadays are going to basically have a bell circuit, which just provides power to whatever devices you're going to connect. And there is a major difference between using self-contained sirens and using a speaker, because when you use a speaker with an alarm system, you also have to use a siren driver. So the driver itself actually tells the speaker what sound to make, what tone to use, so on and so forth. And with fancier siren drivers, you can actually use things like voice. Some of them actually have recordable voice messages that you can play through the speakers that you connect to your alarm system. So there's a lot of cool things you can do with it. However, there is a big difference in how those are set up. 

So basically, I have the SDM 100 from DSC. This is a siren driver, and I'm going to be showing essentially how this would connect as compared to a standard siren, because sirens have built-in drivers in them. Like I said, there are a lot of options out there when it comes to different speakers, different sirens, different siren drivers. We're not going to be doing anything too in-depth today. I kind of just wanted to explain the differences between them, to kind of clear up any confusion for those of you that aren't sure. And essentially, I wanted to show, when you're using siren drivers, it is very important to pay attention to the resistance of the circuit that your speakers are connected to. So, it's a little bit more work to use speakers and a siren driver than it is to just use a self-contained siren. But essentially, these two devices that I have here are, they're essentially the same thing. However, this one I left the siren driver in. So, I'll move the camera over here so you can see it better in a minute. But essentially, this one has a driver board built into the speaker housing itself. So this is a self-contained siren in this one, even though it's the same thing, I took out the driver board and just hooked up a wire, which basically creates a speaker. So these are generally used for test purposes, so on and so forth. But they work to use as examples in this case. So I'm going to move the camera over here, I'm going to show you guys how you would hook up both a siren as well as a siren driver and speaker combo. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the power requirements when it comes to using a driver and speaker. So I'll be right back.

All right. So as I mentioned, I have two of the same, sirens here essentially. However, like I was saying, this one, the lighter colored one, it has the driver board still built into it. So as you can see, the speaker itself is connected to the driver board. And then the wire incoming, which would come from your panel, is going into the driver board here, and that's what tells the speaker how to sound, what tone to use, so on and so forth. So this would be a self-contained siren. My other one here, however, I have removed the driver board and basically just directly connected the speaker to a wire, and that's what would be going to your panel. So the first thing we're going to be going over today is the difference in the wiring for these two different types of devices. So, for these self-contained sirens, this one is actually very easy because all you do is you hook up your wires directly to the driver board, that's inside your siren, and then you run a wire to the bell circuit of your panel. Now, I actually have a battery here, and we can pretend that this is basically an "always-on" bell circuit for the alarm system, because what happens is when your system goes into alarm, it just allows that bell circuit to push out as much power as possible. So essentially, it's doing the same thing as a battery. In most cases, systems actually draw power from the battery to push out of the bell circuit. But that's a video for a separate time. But anyway, if I take the wires here from our self-contained siren and I just touch them to the battery, it is going to immediately go off. And that is because the power's flowing through the wire to the driver board, and that board is telling the speaker how to act. So I'm only going to tap these. I'm sure you'll hear it regardless. But I'm just going to touch these two, and you'll hear the siren go off. So as you can tell, all it takes to run a self-contained siren is power.

So essentially, self-contained sirens are very easy to work with, and you just run wire directly from the device itself to your alarm system, plug it into the bell circuit, and then whenever your system goes into alarm, they're going to go off. However, whenever you're hooking up, whether it be a siren, drivers, self-contained sirens, whatever, all of them are going to have a certain amount of current draw that it pulls from the panel. The panel can only supply a certain amount. So, in the case of like DSC and Honeywell Vista Systems, they provide up to two amps worth of power out of their Bell Circuit. So let's say this self-contained siren here is 700 milliamps. You can have two of these on your bell circuit without any issue because it's going to be 1.4 amps. However, if you add a third, it's going to try to draw 2.12 amps from the system. And since that's over the limit, you probably won't get any sound at all. So whenever you're picking out self-contained sirens, the only thing you have to worry about is the amount of current draw from those sirens. A lot of them nowadays have a low current draw, minimizers in them. And basically, even our outdoor, we have an M85PDS. It's probably our most popular outdoor model. It draws 400 milliamps. You can have five of those on a system. Typically, I only recommend four because once you add that fifth one, if there is ever any additional power draw over it's specced limit, it will basically cut all your sirens out because it's trying to draw too much power. Suffice it to say, though, you can have multiple sirens connected to your system without any issue as long as they are within the power spec. 

However, if we jump over to the speaker and siren driver combo, these work a little bit differently. So I'm just going to go ahead and get this guy out of here. All right. So if we jump into the siren driver and speaker setup, it does get quite a bit more complicated. I'm going to try and break it down as best I can. I'm not an audio technician; if anybody wants to "well actually" me down below in the comments, please share your knowledge. That way, you know, everybody can help each other out picking out the best, you know, siren driver setup. But anyway, to break it down, every silent driver is going to have certain specs that it has to follow. Generally, it will tell you three things. It will tell you the maximum number of speakers that you can connect to the driver. It will tell you the current draw depending on the resistance of your loop. And it'll also tell you the decibel output, how loud it is, depending on the resistance of that loop as well. So whenever you're picking out a driver that you want to use, pay attention to those three specs and then match up your speakers to a configuration that the driver suggests.

So, for example, let's grab the manual for the SDM 100 real quick. I'll just show you what it says here. So as you can see right here, hopefully it's pretty clear in the camera. But under the specs, it tells you, it says up here in the description, you can have up to four speakers. But down here, it shows the different current outputs with different ohm ratings. And then the sound output with different ohm ratings. So with an eight ohm load, the current draw from your system is going to be anywhere from point 4 or 5 up to one amp of current being drawn from the system. With an eight-ohm load, you'll have 110 to 116dB of sound output. Now, if you have a four-ohm load that would give you 0.75 to 2 amps worth of current draw, and then 112 up to 119dB of sound output. So essentially what you have to do is you have to calculate the resistance on your circuit, which is going to determine, like I said, the current draw and the sound output of this driver. So just as a very easy, simple example, this is an eight-ohm speaker right here. So if I take this wire and I connect it to the driver and then I plug it into power because it has eight ohms of resistance, it is going to follow the point four or 5 to 1 amps worth of current draw.

So the only problem with that is most people are going to be using anywhere from 2 to 4 speakers. Generally, you have at least one indoor and one outdoor. But like I said, you can have up to four speakers on this driver. Generally, four is the limit, but I'm sure there's drivers out there that can do more. However, what we need to talk about is basically the different types of wiring. Whenever you're connecting your speakers, because that directly affects the amount of resistance on your circuit. So let me get this out of here real quick. And I don't have enough speakers, so we're just gonna have to pretend these random objects are speakers. So I have a few things here. And essentially I'm going to show you the different wiring setups, which are going to produce different ohm ratings or different loads on your driver. So with two speakers, there are two ways you can wire up two speakers. You can do it in series or in parallel. So general rule of thumb, and I'm sure there's, you know, like I said, more a better in-depth explanation for this. But general rule of thumb that I've learned is if you wire something in series, it doubles the resistance of your loop. If you wire something in parallel, it generally halves the amount of resistance on that circuit. So in this configuration, let's say we hook up these two speakers and we wire them in series like this. That means power is flowing basically out of the driver into one of the speakers, into the next speaker, and then back to the driver for ground. That loop is going to have 16Ω of resistance if these are both eight ohm speakers. So as it goes around it hits that first eight and then it hits the second eight. And then you get a total of 16Ω of resistance on this circuit. 

Now, if we change this to a parallel wiring schematic. So if we move these around, let's say that is our first speaker wired in parallel. And then we have our second speaker also wired in parallel to the first speaker. This is actually going to produce a four ohm load on your circuit. So whenever you're picking out your speakers, and you're trying to decide how you're going to wire them, this is what you have to focus on. So because with these wired in parallel, they are going to produce four ohms of resistance. You're going to get that point seven 5 to 2 amps for the current draw, and you're going to get the higher decibel output rating of 112 to 119dB. So deciding on how to wire up two speakers is pretty straightforward. If they're both eight-ohm speakers, it's pretty easy to do the calculations. Where it gets complicated is if you add 3 or 4 total speakers to this setup, because there is more wiring work that you're going to have to do.

So let's say we wanted three speakers. This is the most confusing to me. Just because you have to have an in-series loop, and then you parallel that with the third speaker, which actually produces six total ohms of resistance. I don't know exactly what the calculation is to figure out how you get six, but essentially, I'll show you that schematic. So if we kind of stick with what we have here, except we create a series loop out of these two speakers, and then if we add a third speaker here and we actually wire it as its own in parallel loop to our series loop. So this is how you would wire three speakers to a siren driver. This is actually going to produce six ohms of resistance total on the driver. So that actually it's not listed on the spec sheet for this driver. However, this setup would work for it because it's in that range of 4 to 8Ω. The only thing you have to keep in mind whenever you're doing a three speaker setup like this is this standalone speaker over here is going to have the highest current draw out of all three, and it's also going to have the highest sound output as well. So if you want to have basically, let's say these are two indoor speakers, and then you want to have one outdoor speaker. I would always recommend using the standalone loop on the outdoor speaker, because that's going to make that speaker be by far the loudest out of all three. 

Now, when we get into the four speaker setup, it's still confusing, but it's a little bit easier to figure out. You know exactly what you're doing. So let's say we add a fourth speaker here. So we have our original two here. We have our third and our fourth speakers here. These are all eight ohm speakers. Like I said most of the speakers you find are going to be eight ohm. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to create a series parallel loop. And basically what that means we're going to have two in series loops parallel to each other. So these first two speakers are going to have basically their own loop here. And then we're going to have a parallel loop of another series circuit for these two speakers. So hopefully my little diagram here isn't too confusing. But essentially, this wire is connected to both this speaker and this speaker. This wire is connected to both of these two speakers. And then you have your second set of terminals connected between these two sets of speakers here. So you have your first set and then your second set. So even with four speakers for total speakers, this circuit actually only has eight ohms of resistance on it. So, like I said, if you guys want to do actual better calculations, by all means, just Google it. There's plenty of information out there. Doing these videos, it's hard to remember everything offhand, since this isn't my primary occupation. But like I said, most siren drivers are actually going to tell you what the best setups are for that driver. So generally, siren drivers are okay accepting anywhere from 4 to 16Ω of resistance. You just got to remember the more resistance on your total circuit, the less current it's going to draw and the less sound it's going to put out. So you want to try and stay on the lower end of the resistance. That way you actually have as much power as possible getting pushed through those speakers, which is going to give you the loudest sound output. So hopefully that was an okay demonstration for you guys. I know it's not perfect. There's there's a lot more calculations that can go into it, but essentially that is what you have to pay attention to. Whenever you're setting up speakers and a siren driver, just pay attention to the driver, watch the specs. Definitely check the manual first before you purchase anything. And that way you can determine exactly how your wiring for your speakers is going to be set up even before you purchase. Because the last thing you want to do is you want to buy a driver, and you want to buy 3 or 4 speakers and then you're stuck trying to figure out how to wire them to actually make it work. 

And if we were going to hook this driver up, essentially, you're always going to have an input and an output on your drivers. Some of them, like I said, have fancier setups where it's multiple input. But for this basic one, you basically have one input and one output. So the two terminals here on my left are positive and negative Bell to panel. So you're going to run a wire from these two terminals to the bell circuit of your alarm system. And then the other two terminals are going to run to the speaker loop. So depending on what you've come up with in terms of how you're going to wire your speakers, what speakers you're going to use, essentially you're going to take the speaker wires and then you're going to hook them into these two terminals here, the speaker out terminals, and then you're going to need another wire, like I said, that's going to connect the driver to the panel. Now if I take another wire here and I hook these two up, now make sure whenever you're using a siren driver, you always pay attention to polarity and whatever you're using, sirens. Period. You want to pay attention to polarity because, it is DC power. So it's specific. However, now with this wired in essentially now I can take the, two wires on the other end here and I can just touch them to the battery like we did before. And that is going to make this speaker go off. So as you heard it, set that speaker off, because now we're feeding power from our bell circuit into the driver and then into the speaker. And now, if this was one of those voice drivers, whenever I provided power to the driver, what you would have heard instead of just noise, it would have been speaking whatever message is supposed to play for that type of siren.

Without getting any further into it, I just wanted to go over the quick difference between the two different types of setups, but hopefully that was informative enough to give you guys an idea of the difference between these two styles. If you do have any additional questions, especially about products on our website, we'd be happy to answer them for you. Get you set up with whatever you want. You can check those out and alarmsystemstore.com like I said we have this driver. We have a voice driver. And then we have a recordable voice driver that you can use. So if any of those sound interesting to you reach out to us. We can give you a quick idea of what you're getting into. And as long as that sounds good to you, hopefully you, leave a happy customer. But anyway, that's going to do it for me today. Like I said, if you guys have any interest in sirens or, speaker or driver combos, check us out at AlarmSystemStore.com. We have both options available, but I will catch you guys on the next one.