Mr. Athena and I want to be able to talk to each other when we’re in our offices, on opposite sides of the house.
I started a thread about this a few months ago, and got recommendations for Ventrilo, Teamspeak, and VOIP solutions like Skype. I’ve been through all of these and none seem to do what we want.
I can’t get Teamspeak to work without a horrible echo on Mr. Athena’s side. I can’t get Ventrillo to work at all. I use Skype at work, and the delay is awful and only one person can talk at a time.
I’ve tried buying walkie talkies, but the handsfree stuff doesn’t work very well, and only one person can talk at a time.
Here’s the deal:
I want something that really works well. I’m talking a minimum of telephone-level quality. No delays, and both people need to be able to talk at once.
I’m not interested in spending hours setting the thing up. I know the Ventrilo and Teamspeak work for other people; they don’t work for us, and I’ve already spent at least 2 hours on each trying to configure them to work. I’m not interested in spending any more time on it.
I’m OK with spending money on this. It doesn’t have to be free.
It only has to work in the house. It doesn’t need a range of several miles.
It’s OK if it’s hooked up to the computer, but it’d be nicer if it were a standalone device.
My ideal solution would be two headsets that communicate wirelessly. I haven’t found anything like that, though.
A low-tech solution might be to get two nursery monitors (make sure they don’t share the same frequency), and put one transmitter and one receiver in each room.
I have cordless phones on a conventional landline, one base phone plus 3 extension phones, in my house. They also have an intercom mode that works just like using a phone. You push a page button to initiate an intercom conversation. You can page an individual phone, or send out a global page to all phones. You can get sets like this for under $100 at Costco, for example. This one is similar to mine.
That might create a bit of feedback, and I don’t think the quality would be very good.
My wife and I have a similar situation; I’m in the basement, she’s upstairs on the second floor. We just IM each other most of the time, but if we need to speak with each other, we’ll phone on our second line.
We do have a phone system that includes intercoms; unfortunately it doesn’t allow for hand-free or headsets. I’d really rather not replace our whole phone system in order to do this.
FYI, we’re wanting it so we can talk while we play multiplayer games together, so the solution has to be hands free and work for at least a couple hours at a time. And I know everyone uses Ventrilo and Teamspeak to do just that, but for whatever reason, they don’t work on my home network and even if they did, the quality is exteremely lacking.
I second the telephone intercom system. We have a Uniden system we bought at CostCo (One base system, three handsets, and two chargers, so technically you have four phones on one line). It can be used as an intercom (like CookingWithGas described), a baby monitor, and walkie-talkies (as in, you can take two of the handsets to, say, a park, ‘link’ them together with a couple button presses, and viola, walkie-talkies).
Er, like I said - our phones do do this. But you can’t put headsets on them. Other than that, it’s a high end system, we paid a lot of money for them, and they do great. I’m not going to replace them for this purpose.
So assume that replacing the phone system is out. Any other ideas?
We bought an inexpensive (less than $70 at Costco, anyway) pair of Motorola 2-way radios (like walkie-talkies) that came with earphones - for when we go hiking, snowshoeing, etc. They have a 10 mile range. They’re not totally handsfree, though - you do have to push a button to talk.
Never mind - I reread your OP, and see that you’ve tried this. My second thought was cell phones with loudspeaker capability, but, again - both people can’t speak simultaneously. One voice will cancel out the other’s ability to be heard.
Oh, well. Good luck. Let us know if you find something - I’m interested.
I think your best solution is to put both computers in the same room.
In all seriousness, though, the phone with intercom function really seems to be the only solution. Although now that I think about it, doesn’t Yahoo IM have talk capabilites? I seem to recall going to a friend’s LAN and they used it to communicate between each other when they didn’t want to yell something that the other team could here.
Many steps down in sophistication from wireless headsets (but one step above tin cans and string) are the old Realistic FM Wireless Intercoms. The old brown-and-gold ones. (Try searching Ebay or Google Images for an idea.)
We used them for house-to-barn communications, and they worked just great. Decent fidelity, and good range (I believe they transmit at 5 W). Just the basic features; talk/lock and call buttons, and volume control. It looks like Radio Shack still makes something similar, though I can only comment on (and get nostalgic for) the old brown-and-gold model.
Oops, forgot to mention the lack of duplex communication ability, which looks to be an important feature. The Realistic intercoms are strictly push-to-talk, half-duplex devices. But who doesn’t like brushed gold accents?
As regards Teamspeak, are you sure it’s not your headphones?
Sounds like the two of you might like Xfire. It’s an IM system for gamers, works like any other IM program such a Trillian, except by setting a two-button combo, you can open an IM window right in the game you’re playing, it supports over 400 games, and it also has a voice chat feature that works quite well. I use it all the time to chat with my guildies playing WoW while I’m playing Civ4, for instance.
(For the Teamspeak, did you set it to push-to-talk instead of voice activated? Voice activated often produces odd echos, so all my guildies and I use push-to-talk, setting a button not used in the game…I use the ` key to talk over TS)
Any full duplex hands-free speaker intercom will be highly susceptible to feedback. With a condenser mics some distance from the speakers, there has to be a fair bit of gain, and with both mics and both sets of speakers active all the time, that’s just a recipe for feedback. There’s really no way around that. If you want hands-free and full duplex, you really have to go with headsets. As to how to connect them, by means of some sort of voip, dedicated intercom hardware, or through the phones, I don’t think it matters much. I kinda suspect you can configure voip software for full duplex if you’re using headsets, but I’ve never tried to do that.
If money is no object, Clearcom makes exactly what you want. I use something similar to the package in that link and feedback is only a problem on the base stations, not the headset units.
What about a cell phone plan with free in-network minutes, using those little over-ear boom mics might work well.
Google talk is our solution. Much better than skype, which is too processor intensive for our friends’ computers.
Free, no echoes, both can talk at once, really good quality. We get booted every so often, but it’s not bad. We use it to talk to a buddy in another town while we all play WoW. Both of us (same room) use the same mic and our friend can hear us both just fine.
I am not sure I understand your demand to have 2 people speak at once.
Is that terribly important for some unknown reason.
I have used walkie talkies at work and personally for years. They work wonderfully as long as you don’t try to do over about 1/2 mile. FRS works fine. GMRS works better, but you are supposed to buy a license to use GMRS frequencies. I have heard that MURS is better than both, but know little about MURS personally.
(forget 10 mile range on anything without the help of repeaters.-----------complete advertising bullshit —10 mile range only works from mountain top to mountain top with nothing in between-------advertising that gives best case scenarios —10 mile range is an illusion—
—nobody talks mountain top to mountain top and very few average people have the use of ground repeaters)
So—not to get too personal here–but what is your problem with actually having to push a button to talk, and let it go so someone else can answer?? And have excellent fidelity up to about 1/2 mile?
I mean this is a technology that those using walkie talkies for the last 40 years or so learned in about 5 minutes of usage. It is really no big deal to learn how to talk on a walkie talkie.
And they are very INEXPENSIVE Especially FRS.
GMRS is only expensive because of the $75 license required-----otherwise as cheap as FRS.
Not want to seem to be overemphasing this facet but ------using an ordinary walkie talkie, whether FRS type or GMRS type or MURS is not really rocket science. Little 5 year olds learn how in about 5 minutes.
Pushing that button to talk and releasing it to hear very soon becomes a natural thing, an automatic thing======you don’t even notice you are doing it.
