Yes, you can. I purchased a component for Delphi (I assume a similar one exists for VB) that interfaces to the Microsoft ACM (Audio Compression Manager). I recorded input from the mic, and then ran the input through the ACM to compress it to a GSM 6.1 wave sample (a codec all Windows PC's have already), and resulted in quite good audio quality at about 1.6kb/sec bandwidth requirement one-way. I send the audio in 1 second packets, and on the receiving end I buffer them myself in case their rate of arrival is not consistant. After a couple seconds of audio buffered I start playback through a user-created custom sample stream. BASS simply asks me through a callback function for more audio, I then feed it already uncompressed wave audio (again using the ACM to convert from GSM 6.1 > standard PCM wave) and it plays perfectly.
I wrote all of this in Delphi of course, but that exact same thing could be done in VB.