[BSeward]

I doubt phone antennas are the bottleneck, they're a pretty minor part of a huge, lumbering voice-transmission infrastructure. Much of that infrastructure is presumably expensively, archaic, and built assuming that audio traveling through it is compressed all to heck.

You can stream tunes in real time over data with quality far in excess of what a high-def voice call would need. There's bandwidth to spare on the data side of things.

This is a meandering article. Marco Arment's response at http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/high-definition-audio conveys the point much more clearly and succinctly.