[reaperducer]

IIRC, Sprint was just increasing the bass somewhere in their connection

That was AT&T's method. AT&T even had a demo line that you could call that would play various sounds and music and you could press a button to switch between the modes to hear the difference.

But you can't really think that a POTS call sounds better than a modern VOIP call?

Yes, I can. Because just before the pandemic, I was able to use a real POTS network in a remote part of the country. Called from one ranch to another over a rural switch. And it was awesome.

The quality of a call is about more than its audio bandwidth. If that was true, then people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an iPod and a vacuum tube amp. And, again, latency is a massive factor, as is true asynchronous communication. Arguing over POTS is a whole different thing than arguing over VOIP.

People who defend VOIP claiming it's just as good have never done a side-by-side comparison. The only advantage VOIP has over anything is the usual "make it cheaper" race to the bottom.

[StillBored]

POTS, is largely of varying service too. The switched network of old was mostly replaced by G.711 on TDM connections, which is probably an improvement for long distance. So at that point it was no longer strictly analog, but then the phone companies started shaving pennies and doing things like pair gain to cram more phone lines down the same wires, which was a fairly large reduction in line quality for local calls.

These days so much of it is routed over IP, which is where all the latency got added.

So, its hard to know what your "ranch" actually was.

OTOH, its hard for any hardwired system to be half as bad as your average cell phone which are dealing with constant channel quality issues, which results in the robot voice (for lack of a better description), and all the broken up audio, or simply silence that one frequently gets from a cell phone. Basically cell phones suck for actually talking to people. <shrug> But once again, convenience trumps quality.