CSMA280 + (20) CSS8008 Ceiling Speaker System

This JBL commercial audio package puts a complete background music and paging system for a restaurant, bar, café, or retail floor into one order: a CSMA280 mixer amplifier and twenty CSS8008 8" ceiling speakers. The CSMA280 delivers 2 x 80W and powers 70V or 100V distributed lines directly through its built-in transformer, so a long run of ceiling speakers connects without extra hardware. Each CSS8008 has selectable 5W, 2.5W, 1.3W, and 0.7W taps, letting you set fuller sound over the bar and softer levels in the dining room. At the 5W tap, ten speakers per channel come to 50W, comfortably under the 64W per-channel limit, so all twenty run across both outputs as two independent zones.

Eight inputs cover the sources a typical venue juggles: mic/line euroblock connections with 27V phantom power for paging microphones, plus RCA inputs for a streaming player or music source. Voice-activated ducking on channels 1 and 5 lowers the background music when someone talks, and priority muting cuts every other channel for announcements. Each output has its own bass and treble controls, and two RJ45 ports accept JBL CSR-V wall volume controls (sold separately) so staff can adjust each zone from the floor. Sleep mode powers the amp down after about 30 minutes without signal and wakes it when audio returns.

The speakers use a dual-cone 8" driver with 96 dB sensitivity and 120° coverage, spreading even sound across wide rooms even at low tap settings. They fit an 8.5" cutout and sit just 2.8" deep behind the grille, a good match for standard drop ceilings.