Telephone voice quality

[gar]

150126-2117 EST

Have you noticed how badly distorted some phone signals are today? Recently my daughter got an I-phone 6, and dropped her home phone line. Most of the time she is nearly ununderstandable. This change was to get rid of their AT&T home land line. Now she is down to only one land line for business purposes. This one land line is for voice quality and system reliability purposes. My daughter, her husband, and my grand-daughter are all on T-mobile.

I am on Verizon and so is my son. I recently got rid of my AT&T home land line, and an AT&T leased line providing DSL service and replaced these with Comcast Internet and voice phone. The DSL was totally unsatisfactory and phone service was over priced and limited capability for the cost.

My son is not using an I-phone and I have no voice quality problems with him either via cell-to-cell or land-to-land or any combination.

Back in the days of analog cellular voice quality was good. Range was also good I could communicate from a high spot in the Irish Hills (MI) to a tower near Whitmore Lake (MI), about 50 miles.

In the October 2014 "IEEE Spectrum" is a useful article, p 36, on cellphone voice quality problems. My comments above correlate with the discussion in the Spectrum article.

Also in the issue, p 56, is an article on "The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy".

More on voice quality. I find that many TV programs are distorting voice, but much less on AM radio. Probably starting in the late 20s, and certainly by the 30s, improvement in voice quality and reduction of background was an important criteria. WWJ in Detroit had their broadcast studio shock mounted from the building to remove outside noise and vibration. Also the room was sound deadened. This was possibly a 100 seat auditorium. Since those days it appears that sound quality has been downgraded for some reason, possibly listeners don't care.

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[GoldDigger]

FWIW, Verizon recently introduced a new high quality voice service which only works between two Verizon phones, each on their 4G LTE network.
It is in beta at the moment and requires the latest OS update on an Android phone. Not sure if it is also available on other OSes.
I have not chosen to activate it because for the moment it lacks some of the useful features like call blocking and callerID. <sigh>
If anyone has tried it, please jump in.

I agree 100% that analog phones (and feature phones as opposed to smart phones) seem to be have had better voice quality.
However, it also seems to me that when digital voice was first introduced it was better than it is now. Possibly less of bottleneck in network resources back then?

 

[PetrosA]

Back when I still lived in Europe, everyone there said that Nokia had the best voice compression algorithm going and they always had decent mics in their phones which I think played a large role in them dominating the European market for so long. A few years back I had to buy a phone off-the-shelf here that wasn't a Nokia, and there were always problems with people understanding what I was saying to them till it got to the point that a customer played a message back that I had left and it was completely unintelligible. I immediately went to the nearest ATT store and bought a new Nokia. Since then, zero issues. I guess they still rule when it comes to voice quality algorithms. The latest generation of Nokia phones also seems to be able to record at excellent quality from the phone's mic.

Here's a quick example:

That's the phone propped on a piano with my six year-old on a cello about four feet away.

I've also tried Skype calls with it and the quality there is amazing (Skype uses a lot more bandwidth than the phone companies do).

With other brands there seems to be more hit-and-miss when it comes to sound quality, Apple included. Reviews I've read indicate that iPhones work better on some networks than others. For how much they cost, they should sound great under any circumstances, but I don't think that's so.

 

[GoldDigger]

Many many years ago the Danish hi-fi audio company Bang & Olafsen produced a flip phone. Not smart at all....
It was a literal clamshell shape and had buttons arranged in a circle like a rotary dial in the lower half.
I believe it cost about $2000 and had a lousy form factor and an almost unusable UI.
But the review did comment that it had the best sound of any cell phone they had ever tested.

 

[ActionDave]

All the girls in my life have I-phones and I have a hard time understanding them when they call. They all claim there is no problem and can understand each other fine. I think it is because they already know what is going to be said before they hear it.

 

[dfmischler]

I think part of the problem is the location of the microphone while a person is speaking. This is often made more difficult by the form factor of the phone (users mostly have feedback to position the earpiece properly, not the microphone). When the voice signal amplitude is low, the compression algorithms sometimes have a tough time keeping things clear. The cell service providers want heavy compression to minimize bandwidth use by individual users, but this isn't always in the users best interest.

When my employer switched to a digital (SIP VOIP) phone system it took some users a while to get used to the different sound of voices. Cell phone systems are definitely worse in this area than wired digital voice systems. Even the SIP systems negotiate the CODEC algorithms for coding/decoding/compression of signals based on what the phone and PBX can both handle.

 

[Dennis Alwon]

I think the problem is old age ontop of all that other stuff. I hate cell phones. I also noticed that since our internet provider- Time Warner- got a higher level of internet service the one we have has seemed to gotten worse. I am ready to believe they are deliberately doing that to force us up the ladder.

This entire phone thing is a major ripoff but a necessary evil.

 

[K8MHZ]

Digitally compressed voice communication just plain sucks.

I remember when cell phones changed from analog to digital. It was almost like learning a new language, the audio quality was so bad. We also lost true full duplex.

Now digicomms are sometimes more clear, sometimes garbled terribly, and usually have a very noticeable delay due to latency and we still don't have true full duplex like the old POTS.

 

[K8MHZ]

I think the problem is old age ontop of all that other stuff. I hate cell phones. I also noticed that since our internet provider- Time Warner- got a higher level of internet service the one we have has seemed to gotten worse. I am ready to believe they are deliberately doing that to force us up the ladder.

This entire phone thing is a major ripoff but a necessary evil.

I like cell phones for making calls. I don't like the fact that some people think if you have a cell phone you are available all the time.

As for necessary evil, yes. I make sure I have my cell phone with me when I leave the house because all the pay phones have disappeared. They used to be everywhere, even way out in the boonies. Now I couldn't tell you where a single one is. When is the last time you saw a real outdoor phone booth?

 

[PetrosA]

...When is the last time you saw a real outdoor phone booth?

Just the other day And I taught my daughter to check it for quarters, just like my dad taught me

 

[iceworm]

Just the other day And I taught my daughter to check it for quarters, just like my dad taught me

Sigh - I'm geting old. It's not possible to "drop a dime" on anyone anymore.

ice

 

[PetrosA]

Sigh - I'm geting old. It's not possible to "drop a dime" on anyone anymore.

ice

That means I'm old too. When my dad taught me, a call was still 10 cents. Soon after they upped it to 25 cents. Now my minutes are unlimited

 

[steve66]

My wife has an Iphone too. She always sounds like she is underwater when I talk to her on my android cell phone. But everyone else sounds fine.

I halfway believe its an apple conspiracy - kind of like when ITunes deleted any music that wasn't purchased through the ITunes store.

 

[grich]

... When is the last time you saw a real outdoor phone booth?

Last week, a few miles from my house, operated by my local telco:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Phone-Booth-in-Kelley-Iowa/71706979627

Proof of how bad it has gotten: listen to Car Talk on NPR on Saturday mornings. The shows are assembled from 20 years of archives. Notice how clear all of the callers are. Real phones on real POTS lines, with the occasional analog cell phone.

 

[suemarkp]

Yes it sucks. My biggest peeve is being put on hold and they play some muzak. That music sounds terrible, because it needs more than 2.5 KHz of bandwidth, and they are probably not even providing that. Then, there seems to be some noise floor that chops the sound off. So there is this compressed poor music that is constantly cutting in and out.

Voice is better, but can be bad especially if 2 cell phones are involved. I'm afraid none of the younger generation is going to know how good voice could sound as it was in the land line days. They seem to think compressed mp3 music is OK to listen to too.

 

[Dennis Alwon]

I still use the old flip phone and just recently added texting. I don't text back because it is a pain but at least I can receive them. I imagine when this phone dies I will be forced to take the next step. I'll go screaming

 

[Smart $]

...kind of like when ITunes deleted any music that wasn't purchased through the ITunes store.

Had a similar experience when I first used iTunes (quite a few versions back). Also discovered when I deleted songs listed in the library iTunes also deleted the files from my computer without any prompt. On occasion even when deleting a song only from a playlist. I ended up never putting my files in iTunes media folder, or if I did, they were copies.

Nowadays I use MediaMonkey almost exclusively for digital music management, but I still keep iTunes on my computer to fix occasional firmware glitches I have with my iPod.

Sorry for digressing. Please resume on-topic discussion...

 

[gadfly56]

Yes it sucks. My biggest peeve is being put on hold and they play some muzak. That music sounds terrible, because it needs more than 2.5 KHz of bandwidth, and they are probably not even providing that. Then, there seems to be some noise floor that chops the sound off. So there is this compressed poor music that is constantly cutting in and out.

Voice is better, but can be bad especially if 2 cell phones are involved. I'm afraid none of the younger generation is going to know how good voice could sound as it was in the land line days. They seem to think compressed mp3 music is OK to listen to too.

Do you remember when Sprint was rolling out its service? They had a whole series of "pin drop" commercials to advertise the clarity and dynamic range. Now you'd have to drop a telephone pole to hear it clearly.

 

[Smart $]

.... Now you'd have to drop a telephone pole while picking up a cell tower to hear it clearly.

FIFY :thumbsup:

 

[ggunn]

A couple of years ago I had to interact with an electrician who could have done the voice for Boomhauer on King Of The Hill. Understanding him in face to face communication was hard enough, but when he called me from his cell phone to mine, he might as well have been speaking in Swahili or barking like a dog.