[drzaiusapelord]

>Before cell phones and VOIP

My wife and I both have cell phones that support T-mobile's HD Voice and its incredible how good our calls sound now. At work, the PBX system I deployed uses plain jane G7.11 ulaw and it sounds good, as good as the old system because ulaw is designed to replicate POTS quality. We also have the option to use G7.22 wideband, but I just never bothered (this wouldnt work on the POTS system so we'd transcode back to ulaw anyway for non-internal calls).

I have the opposite experience than you it seems. I grew up with POTS phone service and it certainly sounded fine, but towards the end everyone had cordless phones that universally sounded terrible. If anything, sound quality is pretty good nowadays on average. Of course, overly compressed audio will never sound good, but bandwidth costs being what they are, there's no excuse to be using anything worse sounding than ulaw.

Lastly, have you used a POTS line or a non-voip PBX lately? I find them to be noisy and scratchy. I'm so used to clean audio that when I have to use a (mostly) analog/PRI transport it really does sound terrible to me. All that background static noise is just distracting now that I'm not used to it. The same way I really can't listen to records or tape players or tolerate SDTV. I suspect there's an element of nostalgia here with the old POTS system.