Looking for suggestions for something I thought would be easy - I have a vintage phone and want to use it as an audio interface on a Mac. Ideally, plugging the RJ11 jack coming from the phone into a device that will convert the signal to digital audio with a usb connector into the computer. The computer then needs to recognize this as an option for audio input/output. This is not for VOIP calling, just straight audio interface.
No problem, but for the phone to work properly, you have to power it by imitating the land line electrical characteristics (typically 48 V), and probably, use an impedance matching transformer to interface with the downstream equipment.
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I’d replace/bypass the phone’s speaker and mic to skip weird impedances, hangup switch, relays, etc with the vintage phone. Basically, use contemporary guts, possibly lifted in whole from an existing gaming headset or VOIP phones. Depending on your project, maybe a small mixer or perhaps even put the USB audio device (soundcard) in the phone and just have a single cable to the computer.
Do you plan to try to get the ringer going?
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