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Comment by TransAtlToonz | Hacker News Reader

I miss how clear the sound was. Cellphones sound like absolute crap in comparison. I don't understand why.

These days it's not uncommon to stack multiple lossy compressors in a chain. Your VoIP phone -> service provider is one codec. Then the phone company to the other phone company - quite possibly re-encoded - then on the other end they re-encode it yet again, to send to the VoIP or cell phone.

IT doesn't have to be that way. Ideally we'd stream the data (whether compressed or uncompressed) directly to the other end. There are standards for this but, well you know how standards are: so many to choose from.

In hindsight I think lossy compression of telephony was a mistake. It's 64 kbps for classic narrowband. GSM and other early digital cellular technologies could provide perhaps 5 - 10 kbps per handset and voice just had to be crammed into that. It made sense in the early 90s in that one application. It makes little sense in other applications, either then or now.

The long distance network of the late 70s into the early 00s was mostly uncompressed digital PCM, while the local loop was analog. The result was a basically distortion-free channel from about 200 to 3 kHz. Oh, and it was mostly synchronous too, so the delay was generally under 100 ms even cross-continent. You used to be able to immediately interrupt the person while talking just as in an real-life conversation. Some telephony systems running over packet-switching with buffering end up with such significant delays in practice that you have to take turns like it's a walkie-talkie.

The rise of Big Latency is trashing our long distance relationships. It is absolutely infuriating.

Oh, and you missed an important one for me, which is that many phones will only use half duplex for the codec (possibly made worse by noise cancelling that will cut the speaker when the mic is active). This is annoying because I used to be able to talk to people on land lines, interrupt them, and then wait for them to finish talking so I can have a turn. Now, as soon as I talk, their audio cuts out, and now I can't tell if they've actually paused to let me talk. I find it very maddening, and difficult to hold a conversation.

Luckily, at least on my phone, when I attach a bluetooth headset, I can still get full duplex audio through the headset

Transferring from one network to another happened back in the last millennium with landlines, too

I'm from Iowa, a state where that made lots of money, globally, for decades.

I am not sure which landlines you remember, but VoLTE voice quality is better than every phone I've ever used, from landlines in the 80s to VoIP Vonage phones. POTS systems ran at a lower quality than current phones.

Yeah, I think so too; modern cell phone voice quality has been pretty good in my experience. Granted, I'm mostly only calling other cell phones, so maybe there could be a quality downgrade if you call something truly analog that's still attached to a landline?

I've never had a cell phone that can match the latency of a 80s or 90s landline for local calls. Maybe the audio is as good, but that delay makes calls distinctly worse.

Latency is a different thing, though. Yes, latency is worse in some cases than copper-connected phones were, but that's a highly subjective statement relative to the connections. But quality alone has never been higher than it was, and it was much lower on landline phones.

The audio is awful. The old landlines advertised hearing a pin drop. And no one laughed at that concept. Imagine trying to hear something comparable with today's mobile phones.

It's entirely possible I have rose-colored glasses on. Still, VoLTE is terrible compared to any other audio service I've used aside.

It wasn't just POTS but also the kind of switches you went through for a given call. POTS over the right lines could be amazing.

One time I heard someone say that people used to fall in love over the phone, but they don’t anymore.

I think it’s basically true.

Old phones definitely have a distinctive sound that I do like, but I haven't really noticed "bad" audio quality in phones?

If I call with Signal or Skype or something, usually the audio is pretty clear, and doesn't seem to crappy to me. Even "regular" phone service on my iPhone seems to be pretty clear to me.

You could argue that it's "too" clear I suppose, but I don't really think it's a bad thing personally.

Most of the times, videocalls sound too... stuffy for me. There's something off about the frequencies, I'm not sure if that's some kind of tight windowing and aggressive compression, or noise cancelling eating into signal, or both, but it's missing the high-order terms, so to speak.

(I've recently switched to using my headphones over audio jack again, and the problem persists, so it's not the Bluetooth headset profile - though in general, when HSP kicks in, the audio quality goes to the gutter.)

I went through my contacts and changed the default calling modality from phone to facetime audio for some of my frequently contacted family/friends. It's curious to me that iPhone's don't really surface the option to choose between "cellular" and "Facetime Audio" more prominently.

SIP trunk typically use very dated codecs like GSM at super low quality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Rate

> The quality of the coded speech is quite poor by modern standards

> The codec is still widely used in networks around the world.

it's a bit like LED and incandescent light bulbs rice cookers and kamado-san sure the new is efficient and full of add-on functionalities but somehow it's still being compared with the old, and still playing catch up

we got "HD" sound, but latency is still there for phones we got energy efficiency for LED, but it's blasting us with blue light (i got some chicken light bulbs lol) we got keep warm and scheduled cooking for rice cookers, but it's tainted with PFAS coating and still don't taste as good as kamado-san

makes me wonder what other inventions that beat the old in every possible way.. silicone chips i guess?

death by a thousand cuts sort of situation optimizing for voice clarity while not always maintaining voice quality (compression, background noise filtering, etc) — the method of transmitting the audio is significantly more complicated

Is that the cellphone itself or the environment where the phone is used?

Neither? It's however the voice is encoded over the cell network. Again, I don't understand why because there's more than enough signal to stream digital audio. It's like they haven't upgraded voice quality in 30 years despite this being an obvious market advantage.

Hell, you can still rig a physical handset to work with bluetooth + cellphone and it'll guaranteed sound terrible.

EDIT: phrasing, wording.

> Neither?

As someone who had to make sure that call audio was properly processed on a phone I worked on to make it match today's standards, I can say without hesitation: it's all three.

The codec you get can vary from okay to terrible; the way mobile phones are built these days requires you to do echo cancellation; and the environment phones are used in requires you to do noise reduction.

Just disable audio processing on your phone, feed the network with raw microphone input and notice the complaints from your interlocutors. I've been there :)

> Neither? It's however the voice is encoded over the cell network. Again, I don't understand why because there's more than enough signal to stream digital audio.

Something's gone badly wrong in your memory; landline phones intentionally drop important vocal frequencies and automatically prevent everyone from sounding like themselves. Cell phones don't do that and have always had much, much, much better audio than landlines.

It's why 24.4 kbps is about the max you can get from a modem without your phone line being a fancy one. Compression (in the musical sense not the Information Theory sense, though they overlap)

it's the phone. between the compression, the impression of it being half duplex all the time, and glitches and drops, having conversations on cell phones is so frustrating that I tend to avoid them altogether, to the detriment of my long distance relationships.

I experience these problems even even both of the participants are at home using WiFi calling.

I have been lamenting this problem for ages.

I use wifi calling and it still sounds bad compared to facetime. Like, exactly as bad as over cell.

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