VOIP on a Big Budget

I strongly believe that if you want to use VOIP regularly, with as little fuss or hassle as possible, a hardware ATA is the way to go. That’s what I do, of course. It requires a larger investment than using a “softphone” with a cheap headset, or microphone and headphones - a perfectly good ATA can be had starting from around $40 - but it generally pays off in the long run, because you’re not tied to a computer all the time.

Well, I recently had to help someone set up a softphone call, for various reasons that aren’t really all that important, and accidentally demonstrated that an ATA and telephone handset isn’t really all that expensive at all. On short notice, I threw together some equipment I had laying around for other reasons, and set it up for them; the end result would been considered a pretty respectable podcasting setup - and for VOIP it was probably overkill. (The sound quality was excellent, however.)

Attached to a fairly nice computer, I had a pro condenser microphone I had laying around, run through a cheap preamp (to provide 48V phantom power for the microphone) and an external USB sound card. Throw in a bunch of XLR and RCA cables, a microphone stand, and some headphones, and you’re looking at something close to $300 USD - just to make a cheap internet phone call. Overkill? Undoubtedly. But, let me tell you, the sound quality was really good, and the whole setup worked flawlessly - no setup issues, no drivers to install, and no performance problems along the way. The closest thing we had to a problem was with the sensitivity of the microphone, which was picking up the ticking of a clock twenty feet away. That was an easy fix, however; the condenser mic we were using is (very!) highly directional, and eventually we got it pointed in a direction where it wasn’t picking up any audible environmental sounds. (We were, needless to say, not in a soundproofed studio.)

It’s certainly overkill, but if you’ve ever wanted to produce the absolutely highest-quality phone calls, for whatever reason, you could do much worse than to go with a similar setup. And, hell, in your free time, you could record a pretty high-quality podcast, all with the same equipment…

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