I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

After a couple of weeks of total existence failure, FX Radio is now back, and even more pointless than ever, thanks to a bit of boredom on my part.
You still get the same *great* content you can only expect from FX Radio's random rotation of far too many sound effects stacked on top of each other (somewhere around 43,000 files at last check), but now, you, the listener, can be heard atop all the madness... if you're loud enough, that is.

As per usual, you can tune in to FX Radio. Now, you can also call +1(360)526-6240 for the FX Radio SHOUT-Box, for your free 90 seconds of fame. You can also sip directly if you have a sip capable device or softphone by using the address sip:fxradio@test.pdaudio.net.
If multiple users are on the system at once, a temporary conference will exist. After 90 seconds, you will be unceremoneously dumped from the box. I haven't found a way to kill a session and be nice about it, so for now, it just drops. I hope to change this in future.

Feel free to do or say whatever you like for the 90 seconds of time you get. This is the internet, which is all about freedom... Right? Yeah, thought so.

Hi, all zero of you who might care about this sort of thing, other than myself, of course.

As you have probably figured out by now, I have been playing with various VoIP hardware/software for about the past year or so, just because it's something to do, with the added benefit of perhaps learning things that may actually be useful to someone at some point. What a concept!

Near the beginning of last week, my snom 320 VoIP phone (which is really nice, by the way), decided to temporarily die. My guess is that something on the flash chip became corrupted, and now it freezes on the firmware update check in the middle of the boot-up process. It is fixable through TFTP, but I'm lazy, and haven't gotten around to doing something about that yet.
In the mean time, because it was incredibly cheap, and I was a bit curious about a few things, I picked up a Grandstream budgetone 101 IP phone to play with.
This is, I do believe, the absolute bottom-end of the entire range of stand-alone VoIP phones, or at least very close to it.
I got mine for $20 on ebay, but they don't list for very much more if you were to buy a new one.
After having had a play with it for just a couple of days, I've noticed a few things that are rather interesting, at least to me.

First, let's look at the phone... It looks like a really nice speakerphone; nice for WalMart standards, anyway. Essentially, it has the look of a regular cheap speakerphone, with the obvious exception that there is a single 10-base T rj-45 connector on the back instead of a standard RJ-11. But, this being an IP-phone, we sort of expect that. Right?
The back panel also has a 3.5MM headset jack (mic on tip, audio out on ring), and of course the input for the power supply.
As far as operation goes, the phone has a really boring/basic web interface for managing your single sip line and other related parameters, as well as the controls on the front panel, which, if possible, are even more boring, especially compared to my Snom VoIP phone. There are only twelve menu options (not very easy to get lost even though they do wrap), as compared to the multiple menus, submenus and sub-sub menus of the Snom.
The Budgetone also has far fewer buttons than the 320, but then, it's also a lot cheaper than the Snom, and is marketed completely differently, so it has a right to be very different if it wants to, I suppose.

Ring tones; It has three by default, and they're all boring. You can have up to two custom ringtones, and both of the custom slots are already filled by default, until you do something about it.
and, until I accidentally over-wrote it, it featured a ringtone with a fake talking caller ID which reads number only, brought to you by none other than... get ready for it... Allison Smith! Oops, well maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that I made it go away, even though I didn't mean to.
They have a funky little tool for creating custom ringtones, which encodes a wave file into some sort of binary thing that includes the raw PCM data, as well as some other stuff, which is, of course, not documented. Ain't it always the way?

Now is where things get sort of interesting:
The sound on this thing is both amazingly nice and incredibly bad. The output audio from the handset's microphone is very nice, and doesn't bother filtering out any bottom-end or creating any additional unnecessary peaks. The mic element is flat (no really annoying peaks like other... Linksys... phones), and it just generally sounds nice. The ear-piece on the thing, however, is a complete pile. It sounds like it was made entirely out of rubber, and has nothing but mids, and not even many of those. Further testing suggests that all of the bad filtering on that side of the call is entirely the fault of the handset speaker. It's probably easy enough to take the handset apart and find another speaker of the same dimensions, and just replace it. In fact, I intend to try that at some point.

Speaking of the speakerphone, there is a really nice case speaker on this phone (it's better than the one in my Snom 320, actually). It goes very loud without distorting, and has a nice, full range for the size. However, there's this problem... Well, two of them, actually.
The mic output of the speaker phone is actually a pretty good deal quieter than the mic on the handset, and, while it has absolutely no dry return on the speakerphone circuit (no local feedback issues), it also has no echo cancelation. So, if the other person doesn't mind themselves being fed back and forth through the internal mic and speaker on the case, and if you don't mind putting your face flat down on your desk to talk to said person, then it's quite nice. Otherwise, it isn't, really.

However, when properly attenuated, it does make a very viable cheap phone patch solution if you happen to be behind a VoIP PBX. Obviously, the input on this thing expects something at mic level, so you have to be very, very careful when driving a line-level signal into it. Cutting it bac by about 24DB would probably be a good idea, and I plan to make up a cable for myself with some in-line resistors on the tip only for just that purpose.
When you plug something into the 3.5MM jack, it replaces the speaker phone.
As I said previously, you can't hear yourself feeding back on the speakerphone at all, and there is no voxing. While this is really bad form for a speakerphone, it's actually what you generally want for a phone patch to a board, ironically. So, essentially, the speakerphone part of this phone works better for something it was never intended to do than it does by simply existing. Go figure!
In fact, you can crank up your output source well beyond clipping, and the return simply doesn't exist on the other side, which is what makes it so useful for this sort of thing.
The Snom also does this pretty well, but it has an rj14 headset interface rather than the much more convenient 3.5MM of the Budgetone, and I haven't had a proper testing cable made up for that yet, or even a cable with some attenuation to make the current setup a bit more useful than it is now.

Some people tell me this particular phone has some serious nat traversal issues, but I've yet to test that. It very well may be a completely useless piece of crap if your PBX is on another network segment, rather than pretending to be a semi-useless one. I'll have to do further testing on that, as they are still releasing new firmware for this phone quite a lot. My Grandstream Handytone 488 ATA, which I have now sent to seether12 seems to work OK to a couple of PBXs on the greater area network with it's latest firmware, so maybe they have improved support for this one as well.

Bottom line: It's a cheap phone. It does what it does, no more, no less. I expected that when I bought it. I still prefer the Snom as a phone, generally, but this thing definitely does have it's merits.
Let's all make a marketable custom TRS 3.5 to dual mono 6.5MM cable with about 24DB of attenuation on the TRS tip, and have a good patching time... or something?
Maybe not!

I am a bad Borris, and have put lots of Christmas related things off until the very last minute, so I'd better get started on those. Everyone have fun, or at least a good time. Can you have a good time without having fun? I don't know. Someone try it and let me know how it goes, ok?

P.S. for anyone who may be geeky and/or bored enough, you can reach me by calling sip:borris@BadForYou.net. Thank you and goodnight.

Welcome, one and all, to a Thursday. This Thursday is the starting-point of a month that may or may not do interesting things. Novembers usually are, at least, slightly interesting around here, for no particular reason, other than the fact that they apparently feel it necessary, assuming they have the cognative ability to do such things, to realize that being completely boring isn't the best idea in the world.
Given that, as of now, this month has only existed for five hours and fifty-three minutes, and that this is hardly an accurate representation of what is to come over the next thirty days, one can only speculate... or, in my case, simply not bother at all, and move on.

"So, what's been going on?"
Well, as I haven't actually written a real entry in these virtual page-things other than linking to shows since almost a month ago, not terribly much has actually changed, other than some new toys to play with.
Naturally, being the bad person that I am, I will now launch into a thoroughly boring explanation.

A few weeks ago, the HandyTone ht-488 telephone ATA I traded byron27 for my Sipura SPA-2000 decided that dying was a good thing to do. It died good and proper, with it's FXO relay clicking in and out in rapid succession when the unit was powered on. How's that for appreciation? I had it for four weeks, upgraded it's firmware, made it work probably better than it ever has, and it goes off and dies on me? How nice!
So, being rather annoyed with the Linksys Sipura's sound quality, particularly their way of echo canceling and dealing with different phone impedances and the like, and feeling a little brave, I picked up a Zoom 5801 FXO/FXS gateway, which is very cheap, has pretty sparce documentation, and almost no one seems to own one. So, the few reviews I could find were very extreme in nature. I could only find two or three reviews, and everyone seems to think that, while it sounds good, it has some very strange issues.
Well, that seems to be pretty well accurate.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that about 98% of all the issues I had with both the HandyTone and Sipura ATAs either didn't exist, or were easy to fix with this new Zoom ATA.
Don't get me wrong -- it has it's quirks, and, to be honest, it's one of the strangest things I've come across in a while, until you get to know it, that is.
There are some obscure features missing from the Zoom, such as the ability to direct IP-Dial, not much in the way of viewable real-time stats, etc. Also, it has this tendency to not put the audio through for sip channels that are not explicitly answered, such as the pre-announce and hold music that callers get when they ring my house, or my lobal TBRN PBX extension. It saves a bit of money when you don't have the PBX explicitly answering the sip channel, particularly with toll-free calls, so I'd rather have it that way. But as a result, approximately two people (at the moment) don't get to have hold music when they call me. This is actually a lot more annoying when making external calls, as sometimes instead of phone error messages that you never hear, it just keeps ringing, and you have no idea what's actually going on. Oh well.
However, freakyfwoof meets Zoom tech support and product management, and apparently some of this will be changing. Yes, they actually seem to listen to customer input. What do ya know?
In terms of sound quality, it beats the Sipura stuff hands down, on both ends of the call.
It even defaults to CPC, which is nice if you own any JKAudio product, which, of course, I don't anymore, but for dgl1984, who also bought one of these ATAs on my recommendation as a Sipura SPA-3000 replacement, this is a good thing indeed.
Also, the PSTN gateway is much nicer than the Sipura one, as it loops back far less... you can make it do bad loopback things, but you have to try overly hard, and it will almost never happen in a normal situation. With the Sipura units, it just happened by default. It's better or worse depending on what phone you're using, but it never completely goes away... It's always hanging around in the background, ready to annoy people.
Plus, the Sipura has this incredibly annoying thing called "echo supression,", which, when one knows what to listen for, is an extremely obvious Sipura watermark. It does bad things to the outgoing dynamics, and doesn't really help the echo canceling process very much. The zoom 5801 doesn't do any of this stuff.
You can also get away with boosting the input and output of the FXO or FXS port on the Zoom without having to compensate for bad echo canceling algorithms, so you can drive your equipment much hotter than with the Sipura units, without being annoying to the person on the other end of the call.

So, this new ATA, along with another carbon phone (this being an old Stromburg-Carlson rather than a Western-Electric), and my new Panasonic KXTG-1032 cordless phone seems to be a rather nice combination. I am now spoiled by dect, having never had access to it before, given that it's introduction to the American telecom market is relatively recent. No fizz, good sound quality, and it doesn't break wireless networks, which is a very common thing for 2.4 ghz phones to do, and I've never seen a 5.8 GHZ spread-spectrum phone I liked the sound of. The higher you get, the narrower the spectrum, and the more annoying internal artifacts these phones seem to have.

Now, as if all this geeky phone stuff wasn't enough, there has been a recent firmware update for my Snom 320 IP phone. In this update, they've practically eliminated local loopback, I.E. when you're on the phone, you don't hear yourself coming back through the phone's receiver at all, unless you're very loud and very obvious about it, by which point you are clipping everything out. Potential phone patch? I think so!
I ordered a Plantronics Snom headset, which is esentially a module with an rj-14 on one end and a 2.5mm miniplug on the other, which comes with a headset. The nice thing about this phone is that all the inbound and outbound gains can be very heavily attenuated, so this may actually be a viable solution for a fake hardware patch with little to no annoying dry return. At the moment, I'm using a softphone and a dedicated sound card for phone I/O, going slightly overboard with dedicated dynamic compression on both sides of the call, as well as a harmonic exciter on the phone's output, and I like the way it sounds. But, if I can get away with it, I'd rather use hardware.
IF this works, I'll probably want to buy another Snom, so I can leave one in the studio, and have one at my desk upstairs as well, given that I really like the sound of this phone. However, I doubt I'll find another one as cheap as this one. In fact, I'm just about positive I won't. This was a freak deal in the first place.

With all this aside, my life has been relatively quiet. Nothing overly fun or catastrophic has occured. Just the usual... Sleeping, waking up, reading books, occasionally talking to people, that sort of thing. Nothing worth writing about, really.
Mom started working at Moses Cone Hospital again in September after quitting her job in March. Now, instead of working second-shift during the week, she works 12-hour days on Saturdays and Sundays, occasionally doing a couple of 8-hour shifts during the week when they need extra people around. So, weekends around here are now incredibly boring, not that they weren't anyway, or anything. Don't get me wrong -- I love Dad, but, well, he's Dad... When he's not working, he's asleep on the coutch or in his chair, watching TV. Lots of activity... oh yeah. As much as I interact with my parents lately, I really might as well not live with them. It's really not much fun being 23 and still living at home.
If anything will finally motivate me to get out of this place, find someone to share a rent on a decent house/apartment, etc. that will, I'm sure.

I guess that's it for now. More when there's something worth saying. Later!

P.S. I want a stereo spring reverb unit. Anyone have a spare kickin' round?