Why do phone calls still sound like crap? In 2016? Whenever

>>57356268
Land lines usually use good old fashioned pcm and sound fucking great.

CELL phones tend to use high compression vocoders, often not even duplex. They sound lile shit. You might also have a "land line" using some voip backend that is using shit vocoders like a cell phone.

Because it gets compressed to 8kbit or 16kbit depending on interfacing networks. That's why they sound like shit.

>calling in 2016
Sorry if I sound like le hipster but I haven't called anyone since like forever. Everyone including ma and pa /whatsapp/kik me.

>>57358834
That's cool, I wish I could still be a careless teenage shit like you.

>>57356268
>Why do phone calls still sound like crap? In 2016?
Because they don't? It's 2016? We have HD voice and 4G calls? Maybe it's time to buy a new phone? I mean, it's 2016?

>>57358928
>careless

Wut?

Also, WhatsApp and similar are really popular all over the world. In a lot of places these IM services have all but replaced ordinary calling and texting as the go-to form of communication over mobile phones. It's not just teens using them.

I'm 24 and everyone else but my mother and my grandmother are using WhatsApp or FB Messenger. And I have a LOT of contacts on my phone, thanks to not having pruned the old and unnecessary ones out since the early 2000s.

>>57358785
Also the bandwidth restrictions. Usually 800Hz to 2.8KHz. Music doesn't sound too good.

>>57360913
Its not directly about bandwidth. Typically low bandwidth systems (like cell phones) use vocoders, which are specifically designed to capture only the sounds made in human speech. They are extremely bandwidth efficient, but also incapable of correctly transmitting non-speech sounds.

If youve ever been on a call with someone and they had a loud noise happen on their end, and it sounded like weird loud garbled speech on you end, thats why. Certain sounds in music also sound really weird and garbled when run through a vocoder.

Even if you give a vocoder plenty of bandwidth, it wont help. Its designed for speech only.