Recording telephone conversations?

[Grotius]

I would like to record phone conversation with friends and family -- with their consent, of course, as is often required by law. I've run a couple of searches on this board, and I cannot find much on the topic. I know that RadioShack sells an $80 phone recording unit (doubtless the one used by Linda Tripp); in fact, I picked one up the other day, but it was defective and I returned it.

I decided not to buy another RadioShack unit because I noticed that Ahern makes a phone 'interface', the RL-100 Telephone Recording Jack, for much less money. See

http://www.ahernstore.com/rl-100.html.

It seems to consist of a phone jack connected to a 3.5mm plug. Will that plug work with the line-in or mic-in on my Sound Blaster Extigy? 3.5mm does approximately equal 1/8", which I thought was the size of my Sound Blaster's jacks. I would certainly prefer to record directly to my computer. Will this Ahern thingie work?

 

[TexRoadkill]

The mini phone jack for headsets and the regular mini 1/8' jack are not the same. They may sell an adapter or if you need to just buy one cable of each and splice them together.

Try the mic and line inputs and see what works best. You wont hurt anything.

Most prank call shows are done from Nevada or NY because those are the only 2 states that don't require consent to record a conversation.

 

[Seanmorse79]

Radio Shack also sells a little suction cup mic with a 1/4" jack - it's a bit muffled but it works.

Also might want to look into a voice/fax modem. This easily allows you to record conversations directly. Trade off here is that you need the line connected to the computer, and the computer has to "pick up" the line (usually causes a noticible click).

 

[christiaan]

Once I just cracked the case of an el cheapo telephone and soldered a couple feet of wire and a 1/4'' plug to the contacts of the earphone. Plugged in my mixer and it worked well enough. Frankly I don't have a clue if I did the right maths on impedance matching etc (hell, I didn't do any) but sound quality isn't a major issue when it comes to phonecalls.

The phone died not long after that though. I don't know what caused it. Maybe just a poor soldering job.