Here’s where it gets a little more complicated than plug-and-play. What if I want to use my 5.1 speakers and my X-fi to listen to music? Windows seems to use the most recently installed sound solution by default, so plugging in the IP-Talky results in all audio being sent through the keyboard, and none sent through my X-fi or any other pre-existing audio solution. Fixing this is simple:

Just open up ‘Sounds and Audio Devices’ in the control panel, and under the ‘Audio’ tab, select the device that you want Windows to default to (The X-fi, in my case). Now, in order to use a different sound solution for any given program, that program must allow you to designate your sound device. Not all programs have this feature, but Skype does.

In the main Skype window, navigating to Tools->Options brings up this menu, where you can select the audio device(s) you want to handle your calls with. There’s also an option to have the ring played on the default Windows sound device (‘Ring PC Speaker’) and you can choose to allow Skype to automatically adjust your sound devices depending on what hardware or hardware settings you change.

Not quite the level of just plugging it in and talking, but certainly easy enough. I made sure that these settings didn’t change when I unplugged and reconnected the keyboard. The multimedia and Internet key functionality was not affected by setting the X-fi as the default audio device. No problems.

I’m wondering why A4Tech decided to use a discreet sound solution rather than just passing things through to an external solution. Considering that just about any motherboard you could ever get your hands on has sound on board, and many people buy discreet sound cards, having another sound solution on a keyboard shouldn’t be on anyone’s ‘must-have’ list. All it does is add potential complications – if you want to use the IP-Talky with a program that doesn’t allow you to select your audio device (unlikely, but possible) you could be stuck having to enable/disable your sound solutions in the device manager on a much-too-frequent basis. If the headphone/mic jacks and handset were all passed through your existing sound solution, there’d never be a need to open the device manager or a setup menu.

You might be wondering if the sound solution used on the IP-Talky is better than your typical on-board audio (in which case you might be happy to use the IP-Talky instead of your AC97 or whatever) – I was wondering that also…

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