"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
d wrote:

I have used JK Audio's broadcast host and continually get echo/bad
seperation

Are you adjusting it for every call?

products range from several hundred to close to 2000 - I'm not adverse
to paying the higher price for the best quality - anyone have any
advice or experience

In general, the higher end units will require less tinkering and fiddling
with each call in order to get optimal separation, but from my general
experience, the cheap Heathkit phone patch is not much worse than the
latest
Gentner digital box _if_ you spend five or ten minutes making sure the
levels and balancing are right on. Some of the wider band units have
several balancing controls for different frequency ranges, too.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

for a home type set-up i would suggest an ordinary speaker-phone, slightly
modified to taste. the speaker is transformer coupled to one ch of a
recorder. sometimes the mic of the speakerphone is wired to a mix-minus and
sometimes not. for a straight interview its not strictly necessary. the big
advantage is that the caller can hear at a level equal or even louder then
an ordinary call. also the cost of an off the shelf stand alone speaker
phone will be much less then a digital hybrid.


i have not used the JK hybrid but am very familiar with telos and gentner
units. i would expect it to work substantially the same in this application
provided that you drive the "send" at a reasonable level and have it
properly configured. if you are feeding it with a mixer output then taking
its output back into the mixer in you certainly will get the howling
feedback you described.

another problem occurs when operators choose to employ the hybrid as a
speaker-phone by not wearing headphones and cranking up a cue speaker. too
much cue volume and a feedback loop to the mic occurs.