The Technoverse Blog

Glad I’m not the only curmudgeon who’s troubled by the state of 21^st century audio! The lower quality of digitally compressed MP3 (compared to CD ) made the front page of yesterday’s New York Times. Economics and convenience are to blame for the lossy, lower-sampled recording formats that are used to cram more tunes into our portable devices.

So why are our cell phone conversations still stuck with a slice of audio spectrum that dates to the 1930s? I’ve written about a newer wide band codec (G.722 standard) that could deliver a far broader 7kHz of sound. Unfortunately, you’re more likely to experience that on station-to-station calls in a large corporate environment (courtesy of Avaya, Cisco, and other enterprise players).

Outside of the confines of an office park, we’re all struggling to make ourselves heard over a skinny, tinny sounding 3.3kHz swath. I found some of the answers as to why this is the case from a presentation given at this year’s eComm event. Read more …

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Skype is taking its time with a VoIP app that exploits the recently unlocked 3G data channel on the iPhone. But they have a pretty good reason. They’re working on adding their own SILK wideband audio codec to  a 3G version of their Apple App Store software. The SILK codec reproduces audio within a 8- 12 kHz bandwidth,  far better than the stingy spectrum slice we experience on our landline and mobile phones.

Is wideband audio worth the trouble? Read more …

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