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I was thinking recently on how bad modern voice calls are. It's all highly compressed and basically unidirectional, forcing the participants to take turns talk
by bit_logic 6y ago
I was thinking recently on how bad modern voice calls are. It's all highly compressed and basically unidirectional, forcing the participants to take turns talking.
The old analog POTS phone system wasn't like this. It had that feeling of almost being in the same room, no latency, true birectional conversation.
I was wondering if there's anything that tries to get close to this old POTS level of quality, at the cost of higher bandwidth and processing power.
Can some of the software mentioned in this thread achieve this?
- bombcar 6y agoMumble can get very close if you tune it right. To make it work well you Amy have to turn off lots of helpful processing that modern systems do.
- ghostpepper 6y agoDo you happen to know of any guides to doing this, or what specific settings/optimizations cause the most latency?
- newsclues 6y agoCompressed cellular audio vs good landlines is a world of difference... and the modern cellular sound still sucks
- sneak 6y agoThe way to do it now is to make calls using an app via IP; FaceTime Audio is remarkably good even over 4G.
- spoonjim 6y agoSadly for some moronic reason FaceTime can’t use hardwired Ethernet. I have a reliable 4ms ping and Apple sells Ethernet adapters for iPads but FaceTime won’t use them.
- cush 6y agoYeah systems like zoom are designed for enterprise where hundreds of simultaneous calls are happening on the same network. They work very hard to make those packets as tiny as possible.
- titzer 6y ago> The old analog POTS phone system wasn't like this. I mostly agree with this, but POTS starting going digital surprisingly early, before VoIP ever became a thing. And of course digitization back then was typically chopping a huge amount of the high frequencies, making things sound...well, like the phone.
- sneak 6y agoYes, but it was using TDM near exclusively in the digital domain, and not packet switching like we do now, which lead to vastly different levels of service compared to now. The problem isn't digital, the problem is packet switching. Most people making calls today have no conception of how good telephones used to be.
- titzer 6y agoSure. Packet switching allowed oversubscribing bandwidth, whereas previous digital telephony actually researched bandwidth (with TDM among other techniques).