I have been meaning to post a few thoughts on the sound quality of HearMe for some time now. This may be the right place to do it.
When I began to set up the hearme concerts, Midchuck and I spent some time in the concert room playing with sound adjustments. At that time, I had 2 studio quality mikes (AKG C1000 and AKG C3000)plugged into our Carvin Mixer and the monitor line out plugged into the sound card. This is basically the set-up that we used for the first concert. I now think that we might have been better off using individual dynamic vocal mikes and no instrumental mike or just the C1000. The C3000 is too sensitive and picks up too much of the room noise. It also was too small a room to really get any balance between the singers (although some would say that we are pretty unbalanced anyway). At any rate, I suspect that most computer sound cards of the cheaper variety are very easy to overdrive, which causes muddiness and distortion. Midchuck and I found that the best sound for our setup appeared to result when the input volume was set quite low (in fact, I had it set almost off at the soundcard)and the sound level at the receiving computer set fairly high. This seems to be particularly true of the cheap mics offered at computer stores. The difficulty of course, is that you can't really hear the results of your own tinkering. The audio configuration utility is of _very_ limited fidelity. When doing a regular HearMe, I have been using the C1000 set fairly low at my end and plugged directly into the computer. I would like to hear from HearMe participants with better soundcards and speaker setups as I suspect that they may get better sound than the rest of us.
Sandy