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Telephones for Audiophiles?


This may be slightly off topic, but I was thinking of Audiogon today when looking at Blue Tooth devices.

I discovered yesterday that I have over 10,000 rollover minutes on my cell phone.

Why?

Because I absolutely can't stand the way it sounds. On reflection,I dont know how any self respecting audiophile could stand the static, the drop outs, and the general fidelity that makes a Bose wave radio sound like a cost no object, state of the art, high resolution device.

If I am dying of a heart attack and need an ambulance, I might reach for my cell phone.

But otherwise, I go out of my way to wait for a land line and feel like I am insulting anyone if I put them on speakerphone. How people talk on cell phones for hours, or try to conduct any serious business on them is beynd me.

Is anyone else here sensitive to this? Are there any telephones, whether wired or wireless that have met your audiophile standards for clarity or quality?

And if I have to use a mobile phone, is there a wired or wireless headset or earpiece that sounds better than others?

Thank you.
cwlondon

Showing 2 responses by albertporter

albertporter's avatar
albertporter
4,949 posts
 
Agree with all the above comments. As for audiophile cell phones, actually there was one but it was a long time ago.

In 1985, for about $2000.00 you could get a Motorola analog cell phone that required an antenna in the center of your cars roof and required a 12 gauge copper wire run directly to the car battery because it drew so much current.

On more occasions than I can recall, if I stopped the car in a parking lot to return a call viewed on my pager (answering service) the person on the other end assumed I was in my office.

Several times I gave my cell number in case we had to get off, explaining it was my car. Then the questions, when will you be in your car? Will I be able to reach you?

When I told them i WAS in my car laughter rolled as they thought it was joke I was playing on them. This is absolute truth, those old Motorola phones that were the size of a suitcase that trunk mounted and analog only operation were incredible.

Funny thing was, they were so powerful i could drive for miles before it clicked to another tower. Those damn things would broadcast forever before they would die.
albertporter's avatar
albertporter
4,949 posts
 
They normally transmit 13 kbs at most. Average is much lower. It's done that way for capacity reasons. Much less information per user needs to be transmitted that way.
Wonderful information Wireless200, sounds like you know what you're talking about.

That reads like the perfect system for the carrier to maximize tower use and get the largest number of users on at one time. With cell phones, time (minutes used) is money.

As I wrote in an earlier post here, it was amazing what those old, powerful analog Motorola's could do voice quality wise, mine was indistinguishable from a land line.

Several years ago when digital was being pushed hard, Southwest Bell refused to move my big Motorola from old to new car. When I pressed him as to why, he admitted the analog Motorola used enough bandwidth to displace 50 or 75 digital phones on the same tower.

No wonder they sounded so good, and no wonder Bell wanted them replaced with digital. I'm sure it's expensive to put up a tower, I've heard some scary stories about how much they cost, especially when there's no space available on the ground and space on top of a building must be leased.
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