On 09/09/2015 06:19 PM, Mike Small wrote:
And what about the talking, meaning the voice quality? I'm finding numerous people lately have cellphones with horrible voice quality.
In the past my wife has occasionally complained about my voice call quality hurting her ears. I never pinned it down but I suspect it was unfortunate concatenating of codecs: each adding its own distortions, sometimes a combination comes up where high-frequency artifacts from one codec snowball in the next. For a long time I have had the theory that phones want to please their owners and so will choose impair the outbound quality in preference to impairing the inbound quality--though I have no knowledge of how that might really work in specific protocols in use.
Recently I have noticed a couple calls from my brother having a muffled quality, so much that I thought he was covering the mouthpiece, but he wasn't. I think there was a radio signal problem, providing fewer bits for the connection, so his iphone was severely cutting the bandwidth-hungry high frequency components rather than drop the call. It didn't hurt my ears, but it was hard to understand him.
So I think voice call quality is impaired by (a) radio problems leading to bandwidth problems sometimes compounded with (b) unhappy combinations of. To the extent people are on an upgrade treadmill and have newer phones, and to the extent the call crosses fewer disparate encode-decode-encode steps, the better.
Mostly wireless call quality seems better than I remember. But that might be my not talking on the phone as much as I used to.
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