It doesn't have to be always on, it could be remotely controlled.
Without analysing the firmware you wouldn't be able to confirm for sure what it's doing.
I suppose one exercise for those inclined would be to reprogram it to listen (perhaps only during the daytime) and see how long it lasts. You wouldn't need high fidelity so a low sample rate would be enough.
It's on your own network, so it's trivial to know when it's communicating and with whom. In principle, it could periodically wake and poll a C&C server to see whether it should start streaming audio or not.