For me, the hope has been that digital voice would allow cramming superior (to humans) audio into the same radio spectrum. I'm really disappointed to see the same old just-under-4-kHz limit being used. SSB incompatibility is kind of pointless if it isn't an improvement. There are numerous reasons to want wider speech bandwidth:
Cochlear implant users need it. They struggle with telephones. People listening in a non-native language need it. When the language is not natural for you, being unable to hear the difference between F and S (an English example) becomes a huge problem. You need to hear every word correctly because you can't mentally fill in the blanks. Distorted audio is tiring. It's just plain unpleasant. Distinguishing speakers would be rather nice. Consider people who are closely related, of similar age, and/or high-pitched females. Polycom has some nice graphs regarding intelligibility: http://www.polycom.com/global/documents/whitepapers/effect_of_bandwidth_on_speech_intelligibility_2.pdf People are even widening up analog in the ham bands now. (for example, 6 kHz wide) Google for any of: hi-fi ssb hifi ssb essb Being analog, this of course does take more spectrum. Remember also that one of the reasons for people to use Skype has been the audio quality, The old versions sampled at 11.025 kHz only. Despite lossy compression, this is better than 8 kHz POTS. With better audio, operating style can even change. There is no need for a phonetic alphabet if you can understand letters just fine. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_mar _______________________________________________ Freetel-codec2 mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freetel-codec2
