It is unfortunate how today phone calls are often heavily compressed. Back in the 80s, 90s, 00s the digital phone network would stream uncompressed PCM audio at 64 kbps and the rest was analog; calls often sounded better back then than they do today. Once we accepted the heavy compression necessary to make early digital mobile phone networks work at 10 kbps or so, we never got the quality back, even though devices have a thousand times more bandwidth available now.
Two handsets connected with EVS/VoLTE-HD sound superior to two analog phones on the same circuit, talking to each other.
If I call my parents' iPhone using my iPhone the call connects using a high-bitrate EVS codec, crystal clear.
I never do that, of course.
I FaceTime them.
[1] μ-law was used in North America and Japan, but a similar encoding called A-law was used elsewhere
Direct at the speed of light (almost)!
East Coast of the US to London, UK, in the early 1980s. Over three thousand miles. Quite expensive. Quality was dreadful.
He's being hyperbolic of course, since there's people in their 90s and 100s who made phone calls way back when you had to talk to the operator to place a long-distance call. But the general point is valid: how many people here actually remember the days when the connection was all-analog? You would have had to be making LD calls in the 1970s probably.
TAT-7 - 4000 analog 3 kHz channels over coaxial, laid 1983
TAT-8 - 280 Mbit/s over fibre optic, laid 1988
No.
Analog copper signals are TERRIBLE. A big reason telecom was one of the first to embrace digital transmissions was due to all the quality issues of copper.
Yes, latency was low, but that was about the only thing going for it.
To get a clear signal over copper you NEED a very large amount of insulation, and that insulation needs to be through the entire circuit. Just one section with frayed plastic, ran too close to a powerline, or is passing under a thunderstorm would introduce all sorts of noise onto the line. The longer the distance, the bigger a problem this was.
Sure, some calls might have been clear, but a lot were utterly terrible.
Of course, this only applied until I tried to make an overseas call - then it sounded like I was calling Mars.
If you go watch an old TV show with a long distance phone call (Comes up on MASH, for example, and the Twilight zone). You'll see people screaming into the phones. That was a pretty normal way to be heard as whispers simply couldn't be heard. Sending out a really strong vocal signal made it easier to hear that over the noise and pops.
As an example, one game phone phreaks in the 70s would play is stacking very long lines back and forth. Route a call across the country, then back, then back again. You could do NY - SF four or five times with a circuit length of like 10,000 miles sometimes before the channel was unusable.
You are otherwise totally right about the potential distortion of a long distance analog circuit. Other times filters would be out of tune and you would hear the hundreds of other analog channels just murmuring in the background not quite discernible, and calling the next town over was almost impossible.
Screaming into the phone was more the pre-electronics era with carbon microphones. The original analog phone systems had no active amplification at all. Voice powered microphones were typical in the military until quite late - I think they still use them as backups on ships.
If someone from Germany can chime in, I believe they had higher-bandwidth ISDN services in the late 1990s onwards.
You could go to E1/PRI to get 2048kbps for €€€€.
In North America ISDN was 56k due to the slower T1 it was sent in and framing.
With Apple users FaceTime audio has far higher audio quality than a "typical" phone call
Wondering what accounts for the difference. I assumed, if anything, audio compression would be more "aggressive" on web-service based calling than "traditional" calling.
LTE and 5G has the option of higher quality voice codecs (EVS) than older cellular networks when using VoLTE or VoNR. They support wider band sampling and higher data rates for better quality audio. Why most voice calls sound bad is inter-carrier compatibility still sucks. Typically calls will downgrade to AMR-WB or AMR-NB (8KHz and 4kHz sampling respectively).
FaceTime calls, or any other pure IP voice services, don't need to downgrade codecs to interoperate. They might have to change encoded bitrates based on network conditions but never go with some lowest common denominator codec because another user is on a different network.
Where can I learn about these topics?
People call for leisure of course, but the phone's part of that leisure activity is still just to convey information not art. The kids all switched completely to txt for the same non-utilitarian conversations once it became available.
For all it's low fidelity, it was actually quite high fidelity, in that it was actually very good at conveying all the "voice body language" information besides merely the words. It was just highly optimized for one job and that job was not music.
an example would be i game on my computer and for years i had a 60Hz monitor and it wasnt til 2020 i upgraded to 144Hz monitor. it is night and day difference in feel that i can never go back to a monitor under 120Hz
As a student I had none of those things.
In the end I concocted a successful scheme where I would buy a series of phone extension cables, convince my university bar to allow me use their landline for a while, book a drum practice room and wire the cables in a long chain carefully to it, using duct tape to keep the cables safe and above door frames etc.
Then I had to join the call, and when it was sight reading time run to the library to print out the sheet music, run back down and play it down the phone.
It was intense, but I got the gig and flew off and sailed around the Baltic gigging for a few months in the orchestra/show band which was awesome.
I really wish that a mobile phone would have worked, it would have saved me a huge amount of stress.
I suppose that's to be expected moving to wireless tech, but local analogue landline calls used to be so fast that they had lower latency than a conversation across a room. I know we've gained a lot and I wouldn't trade VOIP for going back to only mobile, or giving up both to going back to landline, but it is a shame quality isn't higher.
I think at the time this was both less annoying and more easily circumvented. I think it only came up if you bought DVDs internationally, were moving between regions, or wanted to bring DVDs but no player on such a trip.
DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today, although a lot of older works need the lower resolution because special effects and the like weren't intended to be scrutinized at 4k.
A lot of later players didn't care though and were region-free.
> DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today
Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.
No kidding. Recently replaced my copy of war games. The DVD was 'ok'. But the later bluray transfers are much nicer.
Some of the early stuff was literally throw it on a telecine machine, encoded it, and ship it. With lots of film wobble and poor color especially in the red channel (due to a bug in early software). Plus poor encoding noise that didnt have a clue what to do with film grain.
Later on they actually physically clean the film first and scan a 4/8k rate first. Then the better ones a light touch on digital correction. Though some are very heavy handed and create poor a reproduction and you are better off with the previous DVD.
And if you travelled with your dvds, they still worked, unlike your netflix subscription today. (The need to bring your own player to match your disks doesn't change anything because your same laptop that you watch a stream with today had a dvd drive right in it before.)
Region coding was a problem, but simpler and just not as bad as todays streaming geofences.
In practise, average-price DVD players sold in Europe were compatible with NTSC in addition to PAL, but DVD players in North America and Japan only did NTSC.
We could buy DVDs on holiday in the USA and play them at home, but it was difficult to find a DVD player in the USA that would play a PAL DVD brought from Europe.
Similarly, it was reasonably practical to import obscure American or Japanese movies to Europe, but less so the other way round.
My wife & I were in the middle of the new dr who a few years ago, purchased on Amazon. (not rented and not prime, purchased, neither of us has prime)
Go on vacation and we could not access that show.
It doesn't matter how many other shows were available, the show I bought was artificially unavailable. Had I a dvd of the same show for the same money and the same laptop, it would have been available.
(Yes obviously I used a vpn and got around that. My awesomeness to overcome something broken does not make the thing not broken.)
(They say it's for security but they have nearly no security benefit.)
This is the killer for me. I've worked on both video compression and graphics in my career and those projects involved a lot of pixel peeping. The compression artifacts in streaming video are sometimes really distracting now. I keep contemplating switching to bluray but apparently an increasing number of 4K HD releases there are being ruined by questionable use of AI upscaling. It's really sad to me that there's no way to watch many movies in the same quality you would have experienced at a movie theatre.
So of the two, I'd take the new AI version, though it's not perfect. But the happy medium might be the new AI release on regular Bluray. The lower 1080p image toned down the fakeness a bit I thought.
Try watching a European VHS cassette in North America (or vice versa).
That's not a georestriction, but a difference in media protocols. You could easily buy a compatible VCR. Heck, in some countries, Japan marketed VCRs that supported both PAL and NTSC (I had one of those) because those countries would have a significant influx of VHSs from both Europe and America.
It's like saying the choice of 110 vs 220V (or 120 vs 240V) is a "georestriction".
If course the most likely reason is corporate greed, but it's also fun to consider other possibilities. Another hypothetical reason would be for sales in Islamic nations where certain content is prohibited. They could show the government censors that there is some level enforcement to prevent "illegal media" from being easily watched. Whereas without it, the government could have potentially made DVDs illegal in their entire nation. I'm trying to see this through the lens of the design committee back in the early 90s.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-definition_television
Before you just needed a DVD player
However you also needed to physically buy a copy of every movie you want to watch, instead of signing up for one service and having access to thousandsd immediately.
Major downsides to that alternative. My 80-year old friend started borrowing DVDs from the local library 6 months ago as a personal protest against Amazon Prime adding ads to their streaming.
So far, made 3 trips to borrow DVDs and all had various issues:
1) checked out White Collar tv seasons but library only had seasons 1 to 3. Library didn't have last 3 seasons at all.
2) then checked out a British tv series with 10 seasons. The 10th season had 3 discs and the middle disc was so scratched up by a previous borrower that it was unplayable. (The library doesn't have a bunch of duplicate DVDs like Blockbuster Video rentals.)
3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them.
On top of those problems, the library has a very small selection in comparison to streaming. She estimates she'll exhaust the DVDs sitting on the library's shelves in a few months and have nothing to watch.
Another huge negative to DVDs is that she can't play them (directly) on her iPad. Her exercise bike had a mount for an iPad and she used it to watch video streams from Amazon Prime.
She was spoiled by the conveniences of streaming and does not look back on DVDs with any romantic nostalgia at all. The only reason she doesn't just subscribe to Netflix or HBO streaming to get back that convenience was she didn't think she could afford it on her Social Security income. On the other hand, the Amazon Prime Video streaming (without ads) was already part of her Amazon subscription.
We also have reciprocal borrowing privileges at many libraries that aren't in the network. You can always find a DVD you want!
It's the same problem with streaming services. There are several shows at Netflix and other services that doesn't have the latest seasons (at least in my EU country).
> 3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them.
There's no guarantee that a season will be available in a streaming service either. They sometimes only have shows for a limited time, so you could start watching a series but then it is removed before you finish, often without warning.
Streaming will never have a secondhand market.
So the original disk could be copied to writable media.
There definitely would "occasionally" be a movie lover who wasn't actually buying those copies.
Furthermore, once you own a disc you can use it “forever”, whereas with streaming services you don’t know what will or won’t be available in a few years. Many movies and series that are available on physical media are not available on streaming, though for newer productions that also goes in the other direction.
DVDs had those too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code
> they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes
As long as the quality is above 480p, it’s still better than DVD.
But it’s not, DVD quality is 480p. This isn’t a matter of opinion, we can look up the numbers.
I have to point out that DVDs are in fact digitally compressed audio and video. The last mass market video media that wasn't compressed was VHS.
DVDs use MPEG-2 and AC3 for their compression algorithms (both lossy).
The algorithms that streaming services use for compression are leaps and bounds better than what DVDs can do. Further, there's been a lot of research dumped into optimizing perceptual quality at a given bitrate.
As a hobby, I've recompressed DVDs and blurays. With modern compression algorithms and codecs, for me a 1080p stream with AV1 compression and Opus codec is transparent at about 1500kbps. (Depending on the media, Cartoons can go much lower and live action might need more bits).
Watching a 4k movie over Netflix is a better experience than watching the same movie in DVD.
I think you can pay for Apple TV subscriptions and purchases with iTunes gift cards.
What annoys me most about streaming is how impermanent the collections are. Multiple times I've started watching a series only to have it vanish from the streaming service. Other times I go back to my "to watch" list only to find that the thing I wanted to watch is no longer available on the service where I was planning to watch it.
1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute watched is a sink for the business. Streaming is not a massively profitable proposition, so it's not greed to want to ensure you're business is minimising delivery cost.
2) Most customers struggle to see the quality improvements, it's a law of diminishing returns to add higher quality encoding if so many people don't care. You might care, but if more customers actually noticed then it would be more of a driving force.
3) The lower the bitrate, the more people can get HD. Giving more people access to relatively good quality images drives a lot of innovation in compression, not just cost.
- they do not allow anonymous usage (you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information)
- stupid geographical restrictions
- they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes
As an intermediate result, a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video (social media, especially for mobile platforms, use even worse compression). And new Apple headphones seem to use lossy compression as well, so we have a codec compressing another codec's artifacts.