damage
Senior Member
back when i bought my house, i had the place wired w/ cat-5 & rg-6, but never thought about running wires for microphones. a year ago, i got a copy of HAL deluxe from lowes for $9 & have only been using it for the telephony and voice recognition over telephone. last weekend, i was playing around w/ this software called teamspeak ( http://www.goteamspeak.com ). it's a voip type software that is used mainly by people playing networked multiplayer games - allowing them to talk to their teammates across a network.
i installed it on my HA machine & added another sound card to the system for teamspeak to use. i wired the line out of that soundcard to the mic in of the soundcard for HAL. i installed a mic & teamspeak on a desktop & started tweaking mic levels and the teamspeak settings. so now i can speak voice commands into the desktop mic, have them digitized & sent across my LAN to my HA server, which converts them back to analog, sends them through the line out of 1 soundcard into the mic input of the other soundcard & HAL can recognize my commands
there is a slight lag (about 1 second or so), due to the teamspeak encoding/decoding, before HAL responds but other than that it works pretty well. you can scale the free version up to 16 clients.
now to find some better microphones.
i installed it on my HA machine & added another sound card to the system for teamspeak to use. i wired the line out of that soundcard to the mic in of the soundcard for HAL. i installed a mic & teamspeak on a desktop & started tweaking mic levels and the teamspeak settings. so now i can speak voice commands into the desktop mic, have them digitized & sent across my LAN to my HA server, which converts them back to analog, sends them through the line out of 1 soundcard into the mic input of the other soundcard & HAL can recognize my commands

now to find some better microphones.