Gadgetory

some of you might not be old enough to remember this but there was a time when every house had a landline phone with almost no features at all not even a slot to hold extra answering machine tapes but while modern smartphones have literally thousands of uses for all the ways they've improved on traditional phones there's one thing that for a long time they haven't done any better actually making phone calls so you chumps who shelled out over $500 for a flagship smartphone are gonna sound like but when you call your dad to wish him a happy birthday son so what's the deal with that thanks for asking Jerry here's what happened reason number one for shoddy voice quality is interoperability which no it isn't which means the powers that be that is phone manufacturers and mobile service providers wanted to make sure that your shiny new handset could communicate with your sisters old low bandwidth brick over the network regardless of how they were connected number two and I bet you college-educated viewers saw this one coming is cost to put it simply upgrading for a clearer voice experience was a lower priority than focusing on faster data speeds for watching high-definition video fewer dead zones in their service areas and of course massive profits to report to the shareholders although arguably a lot of people would agree with at least the first two of those things but you feed people gruel for breakfast and Kobe steak dinner for long enough and they start to ask why they can't have a whipped cream and strawberry crepe in the morning once in a while so while LTE networks were developed primarily for the purpose of delivering faster data speeds as they've become more common carriers and handset makers have finally begun making serious progress on a new standard called HD voice what's that you ask well HD voice is a protocol that improves audio quality by capturing more of what you're saying you know I don't mean that your phone had a short attention span before what I mean to say is that it can capture a wider range of frequencies than was possible before older phones were good for somewhere in the range of 300 to 3400 Hertz but the human voice can actually make sounds from between 75 Hertz and 1,400 Hertz a huge range that covers the sensual crooning of Barry White all the way to that horrible squealing noise I make whatever new gadget arrives in the mail so HD Voice uses the greater bandwidth of modern cell phone networks to catch everything you say between 50 and 7,000 Hertz making calls sound much more realistic so much fun this concept is similar to what you see in digital music recording so if you're creating a you know WAV file for example taking more samples of the singer or instrument as it's playing per second results in more information ending up in the audio file which up to a point means higher perceived quality so if you're having a conversation over HD Voice your phone will actually sample your voice 16,000 times per second slightly more than FM radio here's where it gets funny though remember those smug pants landline phones from before with their superior audio quality well to use HD voice both you and whomever you're chatting with need to be on devices and networks so usually LTE that support HD voice so that call to your dad might sound crappy unless he's got a spanking new smartphone in a great mobile network anyway but all of this is normal growing pains for new technology and while HD voice isn't Universal yet as more users switch to new phones and networks the day may eventually come when your incoming calls don't sound like they're from Alexander Graham Bell himself and no you didn't sir speaking of history and learning lynda.com with a lynda.com membership you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about streaming teaching well both they stream thousands of video courses on demand and you can learn on your own schedule at your own pace you can browse course transcripts you can 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