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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 3 responses by wireless200

wireless200
415 posts
 
Landline is 0 to 4 KHz. (sampling rate 8 KHz and 8 bits for 64 kbs. Nyquist rate must be twice highest frequency). This is why a T1 is 1.544 MB/sec. 24 trunks times 64 kbs plus some overhead bits.)
What people don't know about cellphones is they're not sampling in the normal sense as we think of it as audiophiles but actually all the sounds are *synthesized* by vocoder. Your phone takes pitch, inflection, tone, etc. information and sends that information over the air and the vocoder merely re-synthesizes that information into sounds. That's why digital phones sound that way. 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. The vocoders used to be, probably still are, set up for particular languages as well and that has an effect, if you're speaking another language than the country you're in speaks and has the phones set up for.
wireless200
415 posts
 
Magfan, I believe the origin or family of languages has enough in common that it is less of an issue. European comes from common origins more or less. On the other hand an Asian language with all the tones and inflections spoken on a European language optimized vocoder would have a challenge being sythesized correctly. Vocoders have probably become pretty sophisticated since the early days. Even in the US, a lot of languages are spoken so the motivation for multi-language use is compelling.
wireless200
415 posts
 
Poor performance is almost always related to high usage as you would imagine in NY City. Show me a system with few users and I'll show you a system where you almost always have good call quality. That provider will either be more expensive or about to be bought by someone else.

Normally the only way the small providers make money is through roaming agreements.

The big 2 are going all out with data now. Even the voice calls will be treated as purely as packet data calls. Voice calls won't even be hitting a traditional "switch" but will be going through routers as packet data. All this is very expensive to the service providers of course. But data and data apps is where the growth and profit is now.
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