NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – JUNE 2012: When Southeastern Sound, Inc. of Nashville, Tennessee was asked to design and install a masking system for a new tenant build-out in a nearby office building, it was the sort of solid bread and butter job that called for a straightforward, affordable solution. The client requested that the system design be flexible enough to add an emergency announcement capability in the future utilizing the system. Southeastern Sound senior audio designer Brian Cook used a cost effective Ashly TM-360 Public Address Mixer/Amp with integrated ducking to power the system. “The client was renovating 5,000 square-feet of office space with 2,000 square-feet left open for cubicles,” explained Cook. “The employees in that open space would be taking calls of a potentially sensitive nature. Therefore, speech privacy was paramount.” After determining the dimensions of the room and the area that required masking, Cook specified twenty Atlas Soundelier plenum-mounted loudspeakers paired with an Atlas noise generator. “We needed a simple amplifier to power the system,” said Cook. “But we also knew that the owners might want to incorporate an emergency paging system in the future – something they could employ with either the telephone system or a dedicated microphone that would broadcast over the masking system loudspeakers. Of course, the noise would have to duck out of the way. The new Ashly TM-360 Public Address Mixer/Amp has three input channels with optional ducking and mic-level gain. Moreover, it was priced affordably.” Indeed, the Ashly TM-360 packs tremendous input and output flexibility into a compact, energy-efficient unit, making it ideally suited to this, or almost any other, simple application. In addition to line-level inputs, it also accepts microphone-level, Dual RCA sum-to-mono or telephone inputs, which guarantees the future paging system will fold in without a hiccup. Transformer-isolated output options are 4 ohm, 8 ohm, 25-volt, or 70-volt. The TM-360 even allows integrator-selected inputs to mix to a separate output, for use in slightly more complicated, two-zone systems. Simple bass and treble equalization provide the equalization tools necessary to dial in any system. “We’ve been using Ashly products for going on twenty years now, and we’ve always been satisfied with the build quality and the performance,” said Cook. “Because of that history, we didn’t have any apprehension about trying out this new product.” Now the tenant build-out is completed and the masking system is fully operational. Cook reports that the Ashly TM-360 is performing faithfully.