High Def Microphone for Mobile Computing

morpheus83 writes "Akustica today introduced the first High Definition Microphone that enables HD voice quality in laptop PCs and other broadband mobile devices. The AKU2103 is a digital-output microphone with a guaranteed wideband frequency response. It is the first digital microphone to guarantee compliance with the TIA-920 audio performance requirement for wideband transmission in applications such as Voiceover-Internet Protocol (VoIP)."

Comments

HD voice quality

[Anonymous Coward]

HD voice quality is an oxymoron. Anyway, there are lots of microphones that are capable of Music quality. Maybe I'm missing the point but this doesn't seem like a big deal.

In any audio application, more is not always better. Past a certain point, more frequency response and dynamic range does not increase clarity. Clarity is what we're after with voice transmission. Plain old telephone service gives more than adequate clarity for most applications and it's quite band limited.

Re:HD voice quality

[Fnordulicious]

There are a number of languages that use clicks, ejectives, and other less common consonants for which the POTS 4 kHz bandwidth is insufficient. Linguists routinely analyse spectrograms of consonants in the 5 to 15 kHz range to determine specific features of articulation. For languages which differentiate consonants in the > 4 kHz spectrum, POTS is unusable. I have had this very experience in discussions over the telephone with speakers of Na-Dené languages, for example, where neither I nor the consultant could effectively communicate a particular word because the frequency band was cut off before some determinant frequency in a consonant. In effect, the limited bandwidth reduced some words to homonyms although they are not in normal speech. So although POTS is sufficient for most languages, there are still some out there which require more bandwidth.

Re:HD voice quality

[NoMaster]

In any audio application, more is not always better. Past a certain point, more frequency response and dynamic range does not increase clarity.

And for other reasons than you might suspect too.

One of the exercises we did when I was a 'prentice telco tech involved bandpass filtering at 300Hz-6kHz. Turns out it's worse for speech comprehension than filtering to 300Hz-3.4kHz because not only does it let lots of sibilants through, it also cuts lots out - specifically, ones that help your brain interpret the ones left behind. Psychoacoustic test results showed that particular doubling of bandwidth decreased speech intelligibility by ~25%...

So...

[RattFink]

Judging by goggling other announcements they combine the microphone element into the CODEC claiming to have less interference from RF sources. This certainly isn't as big a deal as they are making it out to be, any decent designers already aim to keep the CODEC as close to the MIC as possible where quality and will couple and filter the output to minimize this. On consumer devices MIC interference just isn't such a big deal and in professional applications I don't see this getting the dynamic range that microphones have with 1" or larger elements and properly balanced connections that are used today. Really the only use I see for this is to help space save on cell phones, which is a killer feature in itself to cell phone manufacturers if the price is right.