Gadgets for your RP toolkit

Allen Miller, who's been doing RP demos in front of many audiences lately, recommends a $25 Radio Shack gadget to help with your presentations.  Great minds must think alike, because by coincidence I recently bought the same thing for my presentations.  I also discovered through trial and error that you can do the same thing a little cheaper with an $18 Mini Recorder Control:

 

I disconnect the handset cable on my Response Point phone and plug it into this gadget instead.  Now the audio output of your Response Point phone calls will go into whatever PA system is available where you're doing your demo.  Everything works just like you're used to, except now the phone audio will also go out through the house speaker system.

For extra credit, try this additional trick, which works when you're demoing speech recognition in a noisy room (like a show floor).  Use the above gadget, and connect it instead into a speaker system.  If you use a normal computer speaker, you will need an additional amplifier like the Boosteroo, available from Radio Shack for about $30:

This works great for demos inside conference rooms or other places where noise doesn't get out of hand.  If you're in a busy showroom, where you find yourself having to shout to be heard even at close distances, you'll need a bigger amplifier.  One of the guys in the office bought me a Xenyx502 from https://www.behringer.com for something like $80, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.