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Fraunhofer IIS Demos Full-HD Voice Over LTE On Android
MojoKid writes "Fraunhofer IIS has chosen Mobile World Congress as the place to present the world's first Full-HD Voice mobile phone calls over an LTE network. Verizon Wireless has toyed with VoLTE (Voice over LTE) before, but this particular method enables mobile phone calls to sound as clear as talking to another person in the same room. Full-HD Voice is already established in several VoIP, video telephony and conferencing systems. However, this will mark the first time Fraunhofer's Full-HD Voice codec AAC-ELD has been integrated into a mobile communications system. Currently, the majority of phone calls are limited to the 3.5 kHz range, whereas humans are able to perceive audio signals up to 20 kHz. The Full-HD Voice codec AAC-ELD gives access to the full audible audio spectrum."
wow this sounds really cool. I think it's so lame that as technology improved in the past 15 years and we went from landlines to cell phones, we took a huge step back in audio quality. Kind of like the step back from CDs to MP3s. I hope this catches on - do both parties need to use it? Perhaps it will be directly implemented in Skype or something.
It makes every bit as much (or as little) sense here as it does when used to describe a television.
...when the phones have shit sound components.
Handset makers have been so focused on stuffing their handsets with cameras, MP3 playback, video playback, picture messaging and other dumb things in a features race that they only phone-in (pun intended) the basic voice calling capabilities now.
It's worth it, though -- horrible audio is why I don't own an iPhone, just an iPad and an old dumbphone. Cellphone audio quality is simply horrible; whoever decided that the utter crap they call audio was "good enough" deserves to be taken out and shot. And considering how good audio compression is these days, there's very little excuse for it. Yeah, there are several points that have to support it, but we've seen lots of things added to the phone network, decent audio quality could easily have been one of them at just about any time.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
How many users/cell before this starts throttling? in the single digits?
...distribution channel for Full 20Hz - 20kHz music source. Now go figure. Do the maths
There is still no reason to fall back to the G.711 standard from 1972 (!) when using voice. Yet this is more or less what happens for most calls. And the reason is not a lack of good codecs, but fear of patents and inertia. AAC-ELD will do nothing to solve this.
I can make phone calls with my phone now!
Odd. I find that for communication with parties I already know, voice is by far the fastest. Textual communication is often more convient though, especially when dealing with companies or unfamiliar individuals.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Only those who have not had high-intensity hoot and thump music piped into their ear canals for the last ten years. Most twentysomethings won't be able distinguish HD audio from a 1940s telephone. They'll buy it anyway, though.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Once your communication goes beyond one or two sentences, it quickly becomes inferior to written- or text-based communication of some form.
In a conversation you rarely go beyond one or two sentences without some kind of feedback from the other end. Phones have always been used to decrease latency of communication.
You appear to be leet at typing on a phone touchscreen which mean you are only able to talk to 10 percent of the population anyway.
It's actually a variant of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the codec on Blu-Ray audio. But not at a high bit rate, as on Blu-Ray discs. It's AAC/ELD v2, at 24Kb/s.
It's already in IOS Facetime, anyway.
This post doesn't make any sense.
There are very few people left alive who listened to something that wasn't 'high-intensity hoot and thump music' in their youth. Sorry about your lawn.
"Once your communication goes beyond one or two sentences, it [voice] quickly becomes inferior to written- or text-based communication of some form."
Any time I get an IM from a coworker and the exchange goes beyond a short response or two, I invariably type "Call me." Voice communication - which is effortless (unlike typing), instantaneous (unlike typing), and nuanced (again, unlike typing) - is dramatically more efficient for discussing anything more complex than "Meet me at the bar at 6."
HD voice is of limited use, but I find it works good for when you need to spell something or read a serial number, part number, etc. over the phone. It's much easier to tell apart letters like S and F over the phone when you're using a wideband codec.
Of course, text or email is much better for things like that.
Sorry about your lawn.
It's not the lawn that's the problem. It's the billions of dollars in hearing aids that Medicare and Medicaid will be expected to provide for stupid people who stupidly listened to hoot and thump music being played FAR TOO LOUD. One thing to listen to music, another to listen to it on headphones that can still be heard by people five rows away on a train, or in a car that is audible a half mile away.
Never heard somebody using radio procedure over a cell conversation, eh?
I-SPELL INDIA TANGO APOSTROPHE SIERRA SPACE DELTA OSCAR ALPHA BRAVO LIMA ECHO.
I use it instinctively whenever I'm doing something like that over the phone, even if it's a good connection, and I ask the person on the other end to read it back to me phonetically as well. And when it's a bad connection, I'll use "words twice". It just makes sense when it's information like that, and I suspect even with "hd audio", you'll still need to do it, because people can still screw up S and F, D and T, and others like that. Surprisingly, even when you're speaking with somebody who doesn't have radio/military experience, when you start using radio indicators like "Figures", "I Spell", "Say Again", and the phonetic alphabet, people don't seem to have a hard time understanding it.
And yes, a text or an e-mail is better... in theory. On my cell phone, the keyboard is a pain in the backside, and it's very easy to make a typo. And that's one of the rare phones that actually has a keyboard... it's worse with the touchscreen. If I'm in the field, it is usually faster to simply spell it phonetically over the phone, rather than trying to write a text or an e-mail on my phone. And gods help anybody who's stuck using T-9.
And yes, a text or an e-mail is better... in theory. On my cell phone, the keyboard is a pain in the backside, and it's very easy to make a typo. And that's one of the rare phones that actually has a keyboard... it's worse with the touchscreen. If I'm in the field, it is usually faster to simply spell it phonetically over the phone, rather than trying to write a text or an e-mail on my phone. And gods help anybody who's stuck using T-9.
You don't have an iPhone, do you? I've had one for about 3 weeks now (employer issued) and I hate the auto-correct/predictive text on it vs a Droid based device. I am much more efficient with emails/text on a Droid device vs an iPhone. No clue if either use T-9, but I'm guessing that's more of an early Blackberry function?
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
Surely, you would be better served by stock in a hearing aid company.
Note to self:
Sell stock in speech recognition company
You might be right in regards to purely communicating data, but for actual -work- and general communication, voice will always be king, regardless of how 'multi-cultural' things get.
When two people talk, unless one of them is autistic, they convey far more information with their voice than just words. Additionally, I don't know many people who type faster than they talk. In fact, I don't know anyone who legitimately types faster than they talk, and I mostly know people who have been typing for over two decades.
With text, it's harder to bounce ideas around and brainstorm. Unless you're using a real-time protocol, you can't intentionally interrupt people when they're going down the wrong path or you already know what they're going to say.
I find that even simple things like "meet me at the bar at 6" often require several back-and-forth follow-up messages. I'd much rather bump into someone in the hall on the way to the bathroom and spend 10-15 seconds talking.
Most twentysomethings won't be able distinguish HD audio from a 1940s telephone.
Did they have really high quality phones in the 1940s or something? Because anyone who isn't completely deaf could distinguish current phone call quality from "HD audio".
Just means you will get throttled faster.
Until cell providers get a clue, we should not be developing new tech for their networks and instead stop sending them our money.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Back in my day we called it HiFi.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.