I have a problem.  I’m a sucker for cheap gear.  I can’t resist the low-price carrot.  This makes me do silly things -- buying the Alesis 3630 comes to mind, or picking up mics sight-unseen, sound-unheard.  Usually, this does little more than clutter my tiny studio, but now and then I luck out, as was the case with the KEL HM-1.

I’ve spent most of the last decade involved in remote collaboration as a tech support engineer for ednet, whose primary business model is real-time, remote audio collaboration via ISDN & IP for the advertising, post / ADR, and music markets. It's a high-end, niche business that works very well for studios needing what we like to call "CD-quality phone calls". During this time, my project studio has also needed to collaborate with other studios over long distances. Typically, I address this by primitive (fedexing or mailing CDs/ DVDs), or mid-tech (emailing .mp3s, FTP) means.

Unfortunately, these solutions are not suited to a real-time collaborative experience. Mail and Fedex obviously won’t work. ISDN and IP come close, but coding and transmission delays are greater than acceptable for two studios playing music together live. MPEG layer 3 coding delays on dedicated hardware can be up to a third of a second, and even the fastest compression algorithm I have experience...

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