Phones Suck

[omorka]

Dear manufacturers of cell phones:

Die in a fire.

Let me be more detailed. I understand why old handset-and-body rotary-dial phones had such poor sound reproduction; there isn't enough room in the end of the handset you hold to your ear for a better speaker under the technological limitations of the time. What I don't understand is why all phone manufacturers seem to have decided that all phones since then, despite improvements in speaker miniaturization, have focused on making the phone - whether land-line or cell - smaller, rather than improving the speaker.

If I am forced to speak to someone over a piece of technology, rather than face-to-face, I would at least like to be able to understand them. A phone speaker almost never allows me to do so without incredible ear-strain. Some phonemes are indistinguishable over a phone, and some very difficult to hear at all. And cell phones seem to be worse than land-line phones, although I am not entirely sure if this due to the tiny, low-fidelity speaker on the receiving end, or the tiny, low-fi microphone on the sending end.

I suspect that, if I could hear my interlocutor at something close to CD quality instead of as if I were listening to them through a tin can covered in bees, I would not be so invariably flustered when trying to address someone over the phone. Instead, I spend half my time trying to figure out what the hell they just said, and the other half of the time worrying that I sound stupid because I misunderstood them.

And this isn't even addressing the issues of transmission quality. Drop-outs make me want to cry.

No love,

Omorka

Comments

[pinesandmaples]

The higher-end phones that are typically not available in the US do not have these problems to the degree you describe.

But I doubt you really want to import a $500 cell phone just for shits and giggles.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

You don't have the bandwidth for phones so "m" and "n" sound the same and "f" and "s" sound the same. I think that once upon a time bandwidth was expanded because things were even less intelligible. I am not sure why they do not further expand it.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

I am given to understand that much of the problem is bandwidth issues. Better mics and speakers only go so far when the data is transmitted as (the equivalent of) a highly-compressed, loss-laden MP3. And while the total mobile-phone spectrum bandwidth has gone up several times over the past decades, usage has gone up even faster--so there's actually been a *negative* incentive to increasing the data rate of individual handsets.

All that technical justification aside, cawingcrow seems to have some quality about her voice that reacts *very* badly with all the above. To the point that she is nigh-unintelligible over the phone much of the time (even by the shoddy standards of mobile-phone intelligibility). So I sympathize with your sentiments, really I do.

[cifarelli]

Agreed. I dislike talking on the phone for several reasons, and this is one of them. The other has to do with social anxiety issues and worry that the person on the other end doesn't really want to talk to ME, but that's not something that can be fixed by technology.

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

Recording phone calls in a professional booth and playing them back on high-end speakers reveals that the issue is in the bandwidth and transmission quality - not the physical phone.

I'm often shocked at how terrible the audio quality is on call-in radio shows.

Oddly, I find digital audio quality to generally be worse on phones than analog. Hearing compression artifacts on top of the already narrow bandwidth just breaks my heart.