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Interested to see your post. I am looking at the same thing. Our MFL faculty have a 10 year old Lab 300 with Sanako version 9 running on Win XP which we support in house. The PCs now need replacing but to go to win7 or above needs some outlay on sanako software upgrade.

The lab is only lightly used as an actual language lab, only a few teachers got to grips with it, except for the mass listening exams which it works well for. I too would like to look at alternative solutions before going down the upgrade path again. What are others using out there, are there any current recommended IP based systems?

We have been using Sanako language labs for about 15 years now, (I think they used to be called Tandberg), and we have nothing but praise for them.What we like about the Sanako 1200 is that all we needed was the computers and headsets, in the olden days Sanako would install a whole dedicated hardware solution but as technology has improved Sanako have kept up to date and released this software only based system.My major worry (as Network Manager of a school with over 2000 students) was that any solution we introduce doesn't cripple or slow down or network and that it doesn't keep crashing. I'm delighted to say that the Sanako solution doesn't do either, it is very reliable and stable and when we have had the odd problem their technical support was brilliant.Gavin. We've had Sanako 1200 in since last summer, It took untill feb for sanaco to get it working correctly, First they blamed the switch, then the network cards. Finaly they suplied a patch and driver. The only issue I've have since is that the headphones are susceptible to break (we now have abox full for Sanako to replace) and once assigned to a usb port they are not hot plugable.We also noticed that once assigned to a port that they couldn't easily be swapped, check with Sanako (that's what we did) and because of our support contract we were entitled to a newer version which fixed this issue.Gavin. We had a demo a few weeks ago and I am sure we were told that you can use any headphone / microphone on a standard sound card, and the minimum requirements state a PC headset whilst recommending the Sanako ones. However they did suggest and I think I would agree to some extent that their headsets were more robust than most.

We currently have a Lab 300 and have had little problem with the headsets themselves, the worst we have had is the kids pulling the earpads off. The cables are a different story, the original RJ11 cables are very poor and quite expensive. The new USB ones are more expensive, but as we have not used them know if they are more reliable. We have had sanaco for about 2-3 years, and had allsorts of issues. Firstly it seems to jam the network we have had patches and engineers on lots of occasions and they do blame it on everything but the software.

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However without the software there is no issue. The main problem is it seems to be intermittent.with headphones we have had loads of issues not all technical. From lots of broken headphones to sanaco having a fit and having to manually go in to set which headphones to use, or reboot the computers.I have considered setting up Vans on our curriculum network and separating different areas from each other. At the moment the entire school of 450+ PC's is on one subnet.