Did the gasping breaths sound like a dying phone battery or more like a horror movie? A buddy of mine grabbed one of those cheap ones off a random site for like $60, and it worked fine for about two weeks until it started slipping into a British accent halfway through his sentences. He never figured out why, just one day the robot woke up and decided it was from London. The weird part was the accent only kicked in on words with the letter R, so half his video sounded like a pirate. He ended up scrapping the whole channel and doing voiceover himself with a pillow over his head to muffle the room echo.

My buddy Dave in Wicker Park tried the 5am thing for like 3 weeks and he said the alarm part was brutal but the alone time was the whole point. He'd just sit on his back steps with a cup of coffee before his kids woke up, didn't matter that it was 5, could've been 6. Then he switched to staying up late instead and it flopped because he was too tired to enjoy it. So the quiet is what he was really after, the time slot was just how he got it. You could probably get the same thing at 6 or 6:30 if your roommates sleep in, the trick is just having that gap before the chaos starts.