Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.
> Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.
So this is a funny one because its definitely solvable but it's kind of a classic principal agent problem. There's a number of things that are going into 'clear audio quality'.
1. Receiver's audio output quality - This is rarely if ever the problem. People usually use their speakers/headset to listen to stuff besides corporate meetings, so they're motivated to have something at least good enough that they can enjoy their music, talk shows, whatever.
2. Bandwidth allocation - This... this really shouldn't be an issue, but it is because the user isn't paying for the bandwidth, whether that's classic cellphone calls, Teams voice, whatever. And so its in the company's best financial interest to compress the audio as much as is tolerable. This isn't really an issue if #3 isn't a problem and the user is in a place without too much background noise, but with open-plan offices, it is a problem if there's a lot of people talking.
3. User's mic quality - So in gaming communities, people will generally tell you if your mic sucks, because you're just some random stranger. And if your mic sucks and you want people to listen to you, you will probably buy a good mic eventually, tweak the settings etc. In a business context, my experience has been that the audio quality has to be pretty bad before anyone even says anything to the speaker. And then it's up to that person to either try to get it replaced by IT or pay out of pocket for a good quality mic. And this is assuming that they're technical enough to be able to pick out a good mic to begin with or even realize that its something they can solve.
I dabble in live audio. There's a huge amount that still could be done in the audio input space. Mic quality could be greatly increased for not much money, but most manufacturers stuff the cheapest component then can find into any headset <$150. Also, there's a lot which could be done with DSP (digital signal processing) before the mic even hits the computer.
You do see high quality mics and signal conditioning on the higher end systems, usually north of $250. And even then, it feels like that's a knock-on of paying for more headphone quality.
This is all overkill, solvable with the cheapest trash <10EUR pre-covid, setting up Mumble, and using push-to-talk. With moderation this even works for a few hundred people. Otherwise it's perfectly usable for about up to two dozen people, which should suffice for most meetings?
They did get crystal clear on landline. Then we moved to cell phones where quality is still abysmal and the phone app barely works... It's aggravating to me
More like it de-materialized. Unless there was a physical line problem, regular old phone calls over copper lines ("POTS") worked well. They were circuit switched, not packet switched. You essentially had a dedicated path provisioned, end to end. Today, POTS is all but gone. Almost nobody has a real landline. Most phone calls are transported over IP. I converted my landline to VOIP almost a decade ago. It's fine.
You are right, but at least the quality was reliably poor! Today, you'll spend several minutes ask someone to fix their microphone. Eventually they realize it's not even connected to their computer.
I don't understand why audio quality is so bad on every device.
Phone calls are hit or miss whether it'll be clear or not. This happens alot with places like call centers, the whole point of its existence is to be on the phone communicating with voice and the quality is to the point where it's hard to understand.
AIUI, one of the worst cases of interoperability legacy I've ever seen. If even one thing in the pipeline is compatible with POTS ("plain old telephone service", i.e., land lines in all their 3KHz glory), the whole call degrades, and since the whole call is going to be degraded anyhow, almost everything written to handle voice calling just drops straight to the POTS lowest common denominator. Which in a digital world can be even lower than POTS due to our ability to just set a number on our lossy compression codecs with all the regard for how much money bandwidth costs and no regard for quality.
This includes hardware too, e.g., microphones that work fine in the POTS frequency regimes but don't produce high quality audio, speakers chosen just to work well in the old frequency regime, etc.
So, despite the fact I have to imagine the odds of a call hitting the actual physical POTS system approaches zero today, and that in general in 2023 a high-quality phone call wouldn't actually be that expensive, the odds of a call traversing something that lazily fell back to POTS-level standards for whatever reason is still quite high.
One could write a brief sci-fi story in a Star Trek-inspired universe in which galactic war is started because the video call to High Command in the year 2642 is still running on POTS audio quality standards and some words are fatally compromised....
To be fair to POTS, it at least made up for frequency response with near zero latency. What you describe is worst of both worlds -- latency of commodity packet switching plus bandwidth of POTS.
Personally, I'd always choose zero latency over audio fidelity in a two-way communication medium.
Audio calls are fine on FaceTime and Teams (and, I suspect, most other products). But if you and (especially) your team are still talking to your screen instead of using a real headset, then yeah, the quality is going to suck. One doesn't need use the pricey headset and mic I normally use for music production, just something that doesn't have the software DSP constantly trying to filter out background noise while still picking up your voice.
But if you're referring to cell calls, yeah, we lost a lot of quality when we ditched landlines.
Encoding is fine now. Microphones are bad though. Megacorps cheap out on providing some semi-decent headphones to the employees, that's why audio can be bad.
So this is a funny one because its definitely solvable but it's kind of a classic principal agent problem. There's a number of things that are going into 'clear audio quality'.
1. Receiver's audio output quality - This is rarely if ever the problem. People usually use their speakers/headset to listen to stuff besides corporate meetings, so they're motivated to have something at least good enough that they can enjoy their music, talk shows, whatever.
2. Bandwidth allocation - This... this really shouldn't be an issue, but it is because the user isn't paying for the bandwidth, whether that's classic cellphone calls, Teams voice, whatever. And so its in the company's best financial interest to compress the audio as much as is tolerable. This isn't really an issue if #3 isn't a problem and the user is in a place without too much background noise, but with open-plan offices, it is a problem if there's a lot of people talking.
3. User's mic quality - So in gaming communities, people will generally tell you if your mic sucks, because you're just some random stranger. And if your mic sucks and you want people to listen to you, you will probably buy a good mic eventually, tweak the settings etc. In a business context, my experience has been that the audio quality has to be pretty bad before anyone even says anything to the speaker. And then it's up to that person to either try to get it replaced by IT or pay out of pocket for a good quality mic. And this is assuming that they're technical enough to be able to pick out a good mic to begin with or even realize that its something they can solve.