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Strange preamble: I found the quality of analog landlines to be terrible. Since we got switched over to VoIP, the voice quality is crystal-clear if the person o

Strange preamble: I found the quality of analog landlines to be terrible. Since we got switched over to VoIP, the voice quality is crystal-clear if the person on the other end also has a VoIP connection. It almost sounds too good. Better than most online voice chat stuff.

kkielhofner 5y ago
Interesting human psychology note: I was involved in some early deployments of HD-ish codecs. HD codecs are considered to be anything that provides greater than the (less than) 4kHz frequency response of the traditional PSTN. At the time "HD audio" was generally 8kHz frequency response (16 kHz sampling rate because of Nyquist-Shannon[0]). This was around 2009 and many users, having not experienced that kind of frequency response/fidelity were kind of "unnerved" by it because (as you say) it can sound "too good". Users were freaked out by the extended frequency response and added fidelity. A common complaint was that previously undetectable breath sounds, etc were audible. "These days" with FaceTime, WebRTC, etc sampling rates go all the way to 48 kHz, being able to represent the entire range of human hearing (and far beyond the range of human speech[1][2]). Not only have people become more used to the extended audio range, various other parts of the stack (quality microphones/hardware, speech detection, noise cancellation, etc) has caught up and some of those early pesky issues like breath sounds, etc have been largely addressed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00587/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0058...
- myself248 5y ago
  That's funny, because I remember missing breath sounds when switching to digital cellular. That plus the added latency still makes it difficult to converse sometimes. It's weird to me how, after a century of obsessive attention to quality and latency all throughout the whole analog era, through the digital isochronous transition, and up into the first-gen analog cellular system, digital cellular was so much cheaper that we just rolled over and accepted all the terrible compromises. It's not like customers who preferred AMPS had the choice to stay on it. Only recently have I experienced VoIP calls that start to claw back some of that lost quality. Frequency range, bit depth, maybe even latency if I'm lucky. I don't think we'll ever again have it as good as ISDN, but I can dream.
  - kkielhofner 5y ago
    It very well could have been that breath sounds just sounded differently, or the whole experience was unnerving to our user base (healthcare) at the time. In any case we set the sampling rate back to 8kHz and moved on. I too miss the days of a B channel on a T1 PRI!
  - illegalsmile 5y ago
    I miss landlines, talking on the phone was actually enjoyable. I rarely have a cellphone conversation (verizon/iphone x) anymore that feels anywhere near as natural or enjoyable as the landline did. I keep thinking it's the phone, a setting or the network and it's not. The latency and talking over one another just doesn't work for me. We used to have multiple people on a POTS call and it worked fine and now it's always "sorry, go ahead" even when there's one other person on the phone. The BEST cell phone call I've ever had was back in 2004 on a sony ericsson in Bangkok of all places calling my parents on their landline in Chicago. Crystal clear, almost zero latency, it felt like I was in their living room talking to them. I've never had that in the states and I would like to.

kkielhofner 5y ago

Interesting human psychology note: I was involved in some early deployments of HD-ish codecs. HD codecs are considered to be anything that provides greater than the (less than) 4kHz frequency response of the traditional PSTN. At the time "HD audio" was generally 8kHz frequency response (16 kHz sampling rate because of Nyquist-Shannon[0]). This was around 2009 and many users, having not experienced that kind of frequency response/fidelity were kind of "unnerved" by it because (as you say) it can sound "too good". Users were freaked out by the extended frequency response and added fidelity. A common complaint was that previously undetectable breath sounds, etc were audible. "These days" with FaceTime, WebRTC, etc sampling rates go all the way to 48 kHz, being able to represent the entire range of human hearing (and far beyond the range of human speech[1][2]). Not only have people become more used to the extended audio range, various other parts of the stack (quality microphones/hardware, speech detection, noise cancellation, etc) has caught up and some of those early pesky issues like breath sounds, etc have been largely addressed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00587/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0058...

myself248 5y ago
That's funny, because I remember missing breath sounds when switching to digital cellular. That plus the added latency still makes it difficult to converse sometimes. It's weird to me how, after a century of obsessive attention to quality and latency all throughout the whole analog era, through the digital isochronous transition, and up into the first-gen analog cellular system, digital cellular was so much cheaper that we just rolled over and accepted all the terrible compromises. It's not like customers who preferred AMPS had the choice to stay on it. Only recently have I experienced VoIP calls that start to claw back some of that lost quality. Frequency range, bit depth, maybe even latency if I'm lucky. I don't think we'll ever again have it as good as ISDN, but I can dream.
- kkielhofner 5y ago
  It very well could have been that breath sounds just sounded differently, or the whole experience was unnerving to our user base (healthcare) at the time. In any case we set the sampling rate back to 8kHz and moved on. I too miss the days of a B channel on a T1 PRI!
- illegalsmile 5y ago
  I miss landlines, talking on the phone was actually enjoyable. I rarely have a cellphone conversation (verizon/iphone x) anymore that feels anywhere near as natural or enjoyable as the landline did. I keep thinking it's the phone, a setting or the network and it's not. The latency and talking over one another just doesn't work for me. We used to have multiple people on a POTS call and it worked fine and now it's always "sorry, go ahead" even when there's one other person on the phone. The BEST cell phone call I've ever had was back in 2004 on a sony ericsson in Bangkok of all places calling my parents on their landline in Chicago. Crystal clear, almost zero latency, it felt like I was in their living room talking to them. I've never had that in the states and I would like to.