I think it's obvious you're not a parent from that comment. No parent worth their salt would ever put their kid in a circumstance where they stand a high chance of dying (hey, even Michael Jackson had a firm grip on the kid). How do you make the mental leap that connects "baby monitor" = "trusted solution against death"? Baby monitors serve two purposes -- 1) They allow you to hear if your baby is crying when you otherwise wouldn't be able to hear it (say, you're watching a really loud movie in the basement) and 2) Some models have a "heartbeat" or "breathing" assurance function that sounds an alarm if your baby stops breathing. The "breathing" alarms are not very reliable anyway. With our first kid, we had several issues where we would get him out of the crib in the middle of the night for a changing or feeding and forget to turn the monitor base off. This should have caused the alarm to sound almost immediately, but several times it would sound 30-60 minutes later. We even had a couple of mornings where the alarm would sound hours later. There are warnings with these types of monitors. The function is better than nothing but isn't to be 100% relied on. We use our monitor for the first function -- crank up the volume on a movie and relax knowing that if our kid is crying because he's hungry or needs to be changed, we'll be able to hear it. Every parent I know checks on their kid with reasonable regularity anyway and does not do what you seem to be suggesting -- leaving baby floating in a shark tank while relying on the baby monitor to 1) Keep the sharks at bay and 2) Sound an alarm if baby starts to get eaten by the shark. Seriously, I can't understand the arguments in this thread...

What is the point of your nefarious plan? If you play back the sound of my baby crying, I'm going to check in on him. When I see that he is not actually crying but recorded sounds of him crying are coming in through the speaker, it's not going to take long to figure out what you're doing. What was your point again?

Are you from fucking outer space? Have you ever used a baby monitor or been in a house with a baby?