Hey.
All those years at Telos thinking about phones. Hybrids, codecs, even VoIP. If you’d told 2005 me I’d still be thinking about phones in 2026 I’d have stared you down.
But here we are. Phones are how a radio station stops being some guy with a stack of records and starts being a station that feels like family. The request line, the governor’s interview, the listener who saw the wreck.
Anyway, POTS is dying. The telcos are jacking rates to “please go away” levels — hundreds per line. Stations complaining about $40 a line ten years ago would kill for that now.
Your choices so far have been emulating POTS so your hybrid doesn’t notice, or yanking the whole phone system out by the roots. One’s a band-aid on a corpse. The other costs so much, those $200 phone lines almost seem reasonable.
So we built a new thing. The Phone Gizmo plugs a Yealink SIP desk phone straight into your console with balanced analog audio. No hybrid. No apps. No drivers. No Velcro. The phone does VoIP, the Gizmo does audio, and your console is none the wiser.
HD Voice is G.722 with marketing on it. When both ends support it — SIP to SIP — you get 50Hz to 7kHz instead of 300 to 3k. When they don’t, regular phone audio. Either way, clean. $349.
Not for everyone. If you already swapped your phone system, congratulations, go have a beer. If you run a call-in talk format you want a real talkshow system, and I (unsurprisingly) recommend the Telos VX. But if you’re a small station, a one-studio shop, or you just want to put a caller on the air without filing a permit, this is the thing.
Hit reply if you want to argue. Comes straight to me, and I’ll probably argue back.
Stay Angry, Catfish
P.S. The Gizmo is $349. There are bundles with the Yealink phone and even VoIP service if you don’t want to roll your own. Ask your favorite dealer.
P.P.S. For press: we don’t do press releases. Too many “we are pleased to announce” quotes for our taste. So this is a new product announcement, Angry Audio style. If you want anything else — photos, specs, quotes that aren’t pleased — ping me.