Telephone voice quality

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ggunn said:
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.
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I never heard of this guy, but youtube came to the rescue!

 
PetrosA said:
I never heard of this guy, but youtube came to the rescue!

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I have often wondered if that show is nearly as funny to folks who do not live in Texas. I swear I know every one of those characters.
 
ggunn said:
I have often wondered if that show is nearly as funny to folks who do not live in Texas. I swear I know every one of those characters.
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In this part of PA there are also similar characters since we get an influx of people from below the Mason-Dixon line. I watched an episode online to see what it was all about and I can pretty much understand everything this guy says. I'm not sure I find the show funny enough to watch again, though.
 
ggunn said:
I have often wondered if that show is nearly as funny to folks who do not live in Texas. I swear I know every one of those characters.
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I love the show. I stumbled blindy on it one night flipping around. I only stopped to watch it because I recognized Hank Hill from Bevis and Butthead. Now you want to talk about fictional characters you know. I went to high school with those two. Actually there were more than two of them.
 
iwire said:
... For me I would say age and a love of loud music.
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That and too many jet engines and gunfights when I was a kid.

If they are not making eye contact, they are hard for me to understand. And it's hard to make eye contact over a phone.

ice
 
iwire said:
:thumbsup:

For me I would say age and a love of loud music.
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I resemble that remark. I don't think my hearing ever fully recovered from a Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow show I went to in the 70's.
 
When Pete Seeger was discussing with his son the possibility of a few more concert tours (he did them), one of his objections was that his voice was not what it used to be and it would not be fair to his fans. His son replied. "Their hearing is not what it used to be either."
 
ggunn said:
I resemble that remark. I don't think my hearing ever fully recovered from a Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow show I went to in the 70's.
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Very jealous, that must have been great. :cool:

I started going to shows in the early 80s and still go to rock clubs about once a month.

Here is how my wife and I spent our Near Years eve.

 
ActionDave said:
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.
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You must not have an I-phone, if you did they would talk to one another without losing anything in translation:happyyes:

K8MHZ said:
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?
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Being available all the time is a big problem to me as well, that is not why I have a mobile phone. Only pay phone I know of off top of my head is right outside a telephone company central station in a small town. Where does Clark Kent change into Superman these days?

PetrosA said:
Just the other day :) And I taught my daughter to check it for quarters, just like my dad taught me ;)
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It used to be dimes is what one was looking for. These days when you do run into a public phone it only accepts credit card or operator assisted calls - 911 is always free.
 
I have worked in Telecom for 36 years in different capacities from signal transmission to Power Protection Engineering. Not really sure what the topic is about. In the ole days everything was analog. Today with the exception of POT's, everything is digital. Even your POT's line if you still have one, is converted to digital immediately at the switching office using what is now antiquated PSTN asynchronous digital. When it leaves the office is most likely today packet digital over IP.

I work for Verizon Wireless and today there are two different typologies used in cell phones today. One is the old digital format of either CDMA or GSM. Those typologies use the outdated Public Switched Telephone Network aka PSTN. Like all PSTN has very limited bandwidth of roughly 300 to 3000 Hz aka voice bandwidth. GSM and CDMA are what is called 3G technology. Of the big 5 carriers Verizon, US Cellular, and Sprint use CDMA, and ATT and T-Mobile use GSM for 3G technology. FWIW CDMA is the most popular globally and a licensed technology owned by Qualcomm. You guessed it Qualcomm gets a royalty payment for every phone call on CDMA.

4G aka 4G/LTE is a standard not a technology like Qualcomm CDMA. All carriers are migrating to 4G, and th eUSA is way down on the list of market penetration. It is kind of funny because the USA for decades has lagged far behind in technology. South Korea followed by Japan lead the world in technology. They laugh at us with home internet service speeds of 50 mb/s. Those guys use Gigabit internet. Anyway 4G is basically a modified Voice Over Internet Protocol aka VOIP, and high speed wireless data. By modified they use Quality of Service encoding to control latency. Voice has the highest priority assignment and gets passed before any other data to minimize latency. VOIP is what they market as High Definition Audio which really means wide bandwidth of 20 to 16 Khz. If you have a VOIP to VOIP connection audio quality is excellent. CDMA and PSTN cannot compete with voice quality with a bandwidth of 300 to 3000 Hz. If you have distorted audio on a 4G call what is going on is your phone is experiencing FBER or Frame Bit Error Rate sis exceeding re-transmission rates. Just like FM AM or any other radio you are going to experience interference and low signal from time to time.

Eventually digital CDMA and GSM will be phased out like analog was 8 years ago. Any phone you buy today has both 3G and 4G. Eight years ago your phone had both Analog and 3G. 3G is on its way out like CD's and DVD, and Blu-Ray. Remember 8-tracks, cassettes, and Vinyl LP?
 
150130-1152 EST

You can read the IEEE article at http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-mobile-voice-quality-still-stinksand-how-to-fix-it . Read the comments also.

From my perspective I believe the major problems for me occur from ---
(1) Network loading. Greater compression under heavy load conditions, and/or weak signal.
(2) Inter-network communication. Meaning encoding and decoding one or more times including different formats.
(3) The acoustical design of the cellphone (Apple 6).

Once I could hear almost 21 kHz, and thus 15,750 Hz TV horizontal sweep and high voltage power supply acoustical vibration. The TV design engineers did not know it existed because their hearing had dropped below this frequency.

While on USNR active duty in Korea on BB64 I walked out on deck near a 5" gun when it fired. Five inch guns make a short powerful crack, while a 16" gun produced a big boom and you could feel the wind blow by. One ear dropped to a maximum of about 12 kHz and the other to about 15 kHz.

Today my upper limit is around 7 to 8 kHz.

Relative to TV programs there are some today that are very difficult to understand, yet on the same TV set with the same poor quality speakers a rerun of a program from 15 to 20 years ago is perfectly clear and understandable. Thus, the problem is not my hearing or the TV set audio system, but rather something at the source in the equipment and/or production process.

.
 
gar said:
150130-1152 EST

You can read the IEEE article at http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-mobile-voice-quality-still-stinksand-how-to-fix-it . Read the comments also.

From my perspective I believe the major problems for me occur from ---
(1) Network loading. Greater compression under heavy load conditions, and/or weak signal.
(2) Inter-network communication. Meaning encoding and decoding one or more times including different formats.
(3) The acoustical design of the cellphone (Apple 6).

Once I could hear almost 21 kHz, and thus 15,750 Hz TV horizontal sweep and high voltage power supply acoustical vibration. The TV design engineers did not know it existed because their hearing had dropped below this frequency.

While on USNR active duty in Korea on BB64 I walked out on deck near a 5" gun when it fired. Five inch guns make a short powerful crack, while a 16" gun produced a big boom and you could feel the wind blow by. One ear dropped to a maximum of about 12 kHz and the other to about 15 kHz.

Today my upper limit is around 7 to 8 kHz.

Relative to TV programs there are some today that are very difficult to understand, yet on the same TV set with the same poor quality speakers a rerun of a program from 15 to 20 years ago is perfectly clear and understandable. Thus, the problem is not my hearing or the TV set audio system, but rather something at the source in the equipment and/or production process.

.
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For source-specific issues I point you towards just about anything produced in Great Britain. They just cannot get the sound engineering right.
 
dereckbc said:
Voice has the highest priority assignment and gets passed before any other data to minimize latency.
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Yet they charge you more if you want to have texting and other data capabilities with your phone service, I guess people don't know any better and will pay for what services they want.
 
kwired said:
Yet they charge you more if you want to have texting and other data capabilities with your phone service, I guess people don't know any better and will pay for what services they want.
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You can get voice only if that is all you want. Cellular phones is a luxury item like a phone line. You are not entitled to service. Thus if you want voice data and texting, you have to pay for the privilege.

Now one dirty trick, and they have to, is throttle your data when you become a data hog like streaming video or music. A cell channel is just that a single channel that everyone has to share. Think of it like a 1-way 1 lane highway. The more cars on the road, the slower you go. You can always test to see how fast you are running at any moment in time using one of the test services, but it counts as data.

4G in a rural area at night can download up to 25 mb/s. Get in a city during peak traffic and that can slow down to 1 mb/s. Voice has QOS = 1 meaning it goes through ASAP before any other data.
 
dereckbc said:
You can get voice only if that is all you want. Cellular phones is a luxury item like a phone line. You are not entitled to service. Thus if you want voice data and texting, you have to pay for the privilege.

Now one dirty trick, and they have to, is throttle your data when you become a data hog like streaming video or music. A cell channel is just that a single channel that everyone has to share. Think of it like a 1-way 1 lane highway. The more cars on the road, the slower you go. You can always test to see how fast you are running at any moment in time using one of the test services, but it counts as data.

4G in a rural area at night can download up to 25 mb/s. Get in a city during peak traffic and that can slow down to 1 mb/s. Voice has QOS = 1 meaning it goes through ASAP before any other data.
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I know but the thing is the text and data are not so critical to me, yet the kids wouldn't really mind if they had no voice services. The voice services get more priority so they work in more real time, and the text/data is what is convenient to provide in the extra bandwidth and it is what they want more $$ for, and they can get away with charging more for it because most customers don't realize it actually is easier to handle to some extent, but because it is what they want they are willing to pay more for it.

Several years ago when I first got cell phones for the kids they complained because I did not pay for text services - and of course all their friends used texting more so then voice service. Then I finally gave in and subscribed for text. I find it handy occasionally, but otherwise pretty much a pain to use, who has time to punch fat fingers at a tiny keyboard and get wrong characters every third stroke, I could have called and said what I had to say or leave a voice mail faster then I can text, but that's me.

Now 10-12 years later oldest boy is on his own, pays his own cell bill and guess what? He dropped his texting service because he didn't want to pay the extra fees:ashamed: He can't live without the data plan though, he now thinks we are supposed to all get smart phones and send messages via facebook instead of using standard texting services:(
 
You can also get text to speech and speech to text capabilities for text messaging on Android phones. It actually works pretty well for hands-free texting in the car or while eating. (or both :) )
 
iwire said:
Very jealous, that must have been great. :cool:

I started going to shows in the early 80s and still go to rock clubs about once a month.
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Here's a write up of my second concert...

http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/musi...tadium-was-one-crazy-day/stories/200906210207

Has some connotations regarding in this post. What is not mentioned in that write up was that the headliner's were touting the largest concert sound system ever (at that point in time, of course). I was literally pinned against the stage security fence (sideways plywood; position approximate to Laredo) during the opening act.
 
iwire said:
Very jealous, that must have been great. :cool:

I started going to shows in the early 80s and still go to rock clubs about once a month.
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One good thing about being an old fart like me is that I got to see a lot of cool bands back in the day. I don't go to many (any?) touring shows any more because of the crowds and the expense. I saw The Allman Brothers (with Duane and Berry) open for Pink Floyd (the Ummagumma tour) in 1971 for four bucks. There were all of maybe 1000 folks in the audience. It went on until after 2AM.

Those were the days, by cracky! :D
 
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