Some of you might not be old enough to remember this, but there was a time when
every house had a landline phone with
almost no features at all. Not even a slot to hold extra answering machine
tapes. But while modern smartphones have literally thousands of uses, for all the
ways they've improved on traditional phones, there's one thing that for a
long time they haven't done any better. Actually making phone calls. So, you
chumps who shelled out over $500 for a
flagship smartphone are going to sound like butt when you call your dad to wish
him a happy Father's Day. So, what's the deal with that? Thanks for asking,
Jerry. Here's what happened. Reason number one for shoddy voice quality is
interoperability, which no, it isn't. Which means the powers that be, that is,
phone manufacturers and mobile service providers wanted to make sure that your
shiny new handset could communicate with your sister's old low bandwidth brick
over the network regardless of how they were connected. Number two, and I bet
you college educated viewers saw this one coming, is cost. To put it simply,
upgrading for a clearer voice experience was a lower priority than focusing on
faster data speeds for watching highdefinition video, fewer dead zones
in their service areas, and of course, massive profits to report to the
shareholders. Although, arguably a lot of people would agree with at least the
first two of those things. But you feed people grl for breakfast and Kobe steak
dinner for long enough and they start to ask why they can't have a whipped cream
and strawberry crepe in the morning once in a while. So, while LTE networks were
developed primarily for the purpose of delivering faster data speeds, as
they've become more common, carriers and handset makers have finally begun making
serious progress on a new standard called HD voice. What's that, you ask?
Well, HD voice is a protocol that improves audio quality by capturing more
of what you're saying. I mean, no, I don't mean that your phone had a short
attention span before. What I mean to say is that it can capture a wider range
of frequencies than was possible before. Older phones were good for somewhere in
the range of 300 to 3,400 hertz. But the
human voice can actually make sounds from between 75 hertz and 1,400 hertz. A
huge range that covers the sensual cruning of Barry White all the way to
that horrible squealing noise I make whenever a new gadget arrives in the
mail. HD voice uses the greater bandwidth of
modern cell phone networks to catch everything you say between 50 and 7,000
hertz, making calls sound much more realistic. There's so much blood. This
concept is similar to what you see in digital music recording. So if you're
creating a, you know, wave file, for example, taking more samples of the
singer or instrument as it's playing per
second results in more information ending up in the audio file, which up to
a point means higher perceived quality. So if you're having a conversation over
HD voice, your phone will actually sample your voice 16,000 times per
second, slightly more than FM radio. Here's where it gets funny, though.
Remember those smug pants landline phones from before with their superior
audio quality? Well, to use HD voice,
both you and whomever you're chatting with need to be on devices and networks,
so usually LTE, that support HD voice.
So that call to your dad might sound crappy unless he's got a spanking new
smartphone and a great mobile network anyway. But all of this is normal
growing pains for new technology. And while HD voice isn't universal yet, as
more users switch to new phones and networks, the day may eventually come
when your incoming calls don't sound like they're from Alexander Graham Bell
himself. And no, you didn't, sir.
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