> You might try cranking the mic lvl to 255, or 220, or
> something.  I think that all of the lvls go from 0 to
> 255, so 96 might be a bit low.

Yes, actually when I was doing my test I had the mic vol at 250 but
that seemed way too high (think of how I normally have rat setup on my
Sun at work - speaker at 80% and mic at 20%).

I did find though that if I set outputs.mic.mute=on I could stop the
mic feeding straight to the speakers which was really bugging me.

I can now leave the mic volume at 250 without serious risk of blowing
the speakers when I get out of my chair :-)

--sjg