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Phone voice quality

S

stevec67

pfm Member
Is it just me or with the ever increasing volume of phone traffic have we lost voice intelligibility? I seem to be able to hear OK, most of the time, and I know that my diction is clear enough, but today's recent conversation was a case in point:
"Hello, please may I speak to XXXX?"
Yes, who is it please?
"Steve XXXX"
"Will she know what it's about Eve?"
"No, it's Steve... Stephen"
OK Eden, will she know...
"No, My...Name...Is...Ste Phen"
(Finally) "Oh, right, Stephen, putting you through."
Christ. It's not like Steve/Stephen is an unusual name. What would a man be doing called Eve, anyway? Or indeed Eden? I've never met an Eden.

Now the young man answering the other phone was not foreign, didn't sound to be deaf, and he may not have been Brain Of Britain but he didn't seem to be too far off the pace, so was he either deaf, stupid, or is phone quality crap these days?
 
Mobile phones are often compromised, in terms of audio quality, compared to the primitive landline . In addition to this I find that some people have poor diction, that doesn't help.
 
I have some hearing loss and 'normal' phone conversation with friends and family is still possible, BUT I'm finding that phone calls from many companies have absolutely appalling quality and I often have to ring off and call them back.
 
kennyh said:
Jenny, fecking Jenny all the time, count yourself lucky Steve as Eve's a far nicer name. :D
Click to expand...
Eve was a first, I must admit. I get "Keith" fairly regularly, which I can understand if you miss the leading "S" and just pick up the "eee" and a blurred sibilant at the end. My Dad is fairly profoundly deaf, he struggles like hell on the phone, it must be horrible. I think handsets are getting cheaper too, I've tried a few and they all have crap voice quality and tiny mikes, which can't help.
 
Diction problems aside - and they are many and varied - it's all down to crap hardware.

Modern landline phones are cheap and nasty over complicated lightweight rubbish, and the mobile phone business model is clearly predicated on the assumption that no one uses them for making phone calls.

I'm with kennyh on this: invest in Bakelite!
 
MikeMA said:
Diction problems aside - and they are many and varied - it's all down to crap hardware.

Modern landline phones are cheap and nasty over complicated lightweight rubbish, and the mobile phone business model is clearly predicated on the assumption that no one uses them for making phone calls.

I'm with kennyh on this: invest in Bakelite!
Click to expand...

The microphone and DSP in a modern phone is way superior than the horrible carbon mic in a bakelite phone. The problem is that nobody talks into a mic any more.
 
stevec67 said:
Is it just me or with the ever increasing volume of phone traffic have we lost voice intelligibility? I seem to be able to hear OK, most of the time, and I know that my diction is clear enough, but today's recent conversation was a case in point:
"Hello, please may I speak to XXXX?"
Yes, who is it please?
"Steve XXXX"
"Will she know what it's about Eve?"
"No, it's Steve... Stephen"
OK Eden, will she know...
"No, My...Name...Is...Ste Phen"
(Finally) "Oh, right, Stephen, putting you through."
Christ. It's not like Steve/Stephen is an unusual name. What would a man be doing called Eve, anyway? Or indeed Eden? I've never met an Eden.

Now the young man answering the other phone was not foreign, didn't sound to be deaf, and he may not have been Brain Of Britain but he didn't seem to be too far off the pace, so was he either deaf, stupid, or is phone quality crap these days?
Click to expand...
I know a man called Eden. It's his given name.

Problems with intelligibility aren't restricted to phone calls. An old friend, also a Stephen, enrolled at university. This was in person. Somehow, the letter confirming his enrolment gave his name as "Stephanie". He returned to the office to correct the mistake and was satisfied with the outcome, until he later received a letter and a form from the Dept of Internal Affairs asking him to register his alias!

I knew a Seamus whose landlord called him "Grumas" on the lease agreement. It became his nickname, for a time.
 
In the last century your call was usually circuit switched 64k PCM. These days anything using 4G or going near a call centre is VOIP, at a much lower bit rate CODEC and with packet loss. The result is a fundamental loss of quality
 
stevec67 said:
Is it just me or with the ever increasing volume of phone traffic have we lost voice intelligibility? I seem to be able to hear OK, most of the time, and I know that my diction is clear enough, but today's recent conversation was a case in point:
"Hello, please may I speak to XXXX?"
Yes, who is it please?
"Steve XXXX"
"Will she know what it's about Eve?"
"No, it's Steve... Stephen"
OK Eden, will she know...
Click to expand...

Were you eating fruit at the time? :)
 
davidsrsb said:
In the last century your call was usually circuit switched 64k PCM. These days anything using 4G or going near a call centre is VOIP, at a much lower bit rate CODEC and with packet loss. The result is a fundamental loss of quality
Click to expand...

Not entirely true, 4G uses a codec based on G.722 which is an adaptive codec, G.722 can achieve the same quality as G.711 (64k) using only 24k but mobile operators don't use this much bandwidth. Most operators now support/use VoLTE but limit to 13k and there is not a huge amount of improvement between 13k and 24k.

I haven't designed a contact centre or telephony solution using G729 for a number of years now as SIP trunks and bandwidth are so cheap these days that it makes sense to use G.711 (64k) everywhere.

The problem these days is the microphone and speakers in mobile phones are just plain shite.

ps there's no difference between 64k PCM and G.711 VoiP, they are both based on the same sampling rate and freq (8 bits x 8 Khz)
 
And packet-loss is now not normally present either - in fact exceedingly rare for the fixed-voice network (though VoIP can be surprisingly resilient to modest levels of this)
 
gustavm said:
And packet-loss is now not normally present either - in fact exceedingly rare for the fixed-voice network (though VoIP can be surprisingly resilient to modest levels of this)
Click to expand...

Indeed. Even a small amount of buffering does wonders.
 
There are many companies with less than perfect voip implementations, which restricts voice quality. Nowadays I get better voice quality over FaceTime or Skype thann via the mobile network, even with only a 3G connection (I haven’t had a landline since 2014).
 
No one speaks directly into the microphone anymore. I suppose that's impossible if you're holding the phone to your ear.

My pet peeve is people who put the phone on "speaker mode" which makes intelligibility even worse.

But then phone manners in general are just deplorable anymore.
 
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