[LAD] Re: Audio over Cat5

Regarding this whole audio over Cat5 thread, do we actually understand what the objective is of this exercise / project? Is the original authors use of terminology such that we know what is actually supposed to be achieved? When I first read this, I thought the idea was to produce some sort of network-transported audio stream, like that of a video stream, something which could be "listened to" by some network-connected client computer with its own audio output hardware. Since routers themselves have no speakers, I could not reach any other conclusion. Now it sounds more like a hack to get packets to somehow generate audio as a byproduct ... kind of like the audio version of streaming video via ASCII on a character terminal. Or a better analogy would be getting the old PC "speaker" to emit discernible sounds by sending digital data to it's IO port. It reminds me of a story my uncle the television engineer told me about how there was a scrap pile of old bolts and cables lying on the floor in the corner of the antenna-transmitter shack of the VHF TV station where he was chief engineer for a number of years before he retired. One day, after replacing a couple of guy wire mounting brackets on the tower (a tower of about 1200'), he threw the scrap hardware on the junk pile in the shack. Suddenly, he could hear the audio signal for the station coming out of the junk pile. He tried to leave the pile undisturbed after that to preserve the effect, but eventually someone bumped or otherwise changed the pile and it stopped "working". Sorry, I digress. So tell me again ... what is the real goal of this project? - Doug H