Elwood Edwards, voice of AOL's 'you've got mail' alert, has died

Fun story about that. Back in 1996 Nicholas Negroponte wrote a column in Wired lamenting the fact that laptop batteries didn't show their charge state. This mattered because all of us who travelled a lot carried multiple batteries to switch them in our laptops (some laptops could have two batteries at once allowing hot swapping without a shutdown). See: https://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED4-12.html: "I now carry eight to ten battery packs during long trips. I won't even consider a laptop design that includes unstackable batteries. The fact that most batteries don't indicate their charge state is pathetic."

I emailed Negroponte with my solution: before a trip I'd charge all my batteries up (I think I had five) and I had numbered them by writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on them with a sharpie. Then, I'd simply use them in numerical order. He graciously replied something along the lines of "Sometimes the best solution is the simplest".

I was wondering if the format might also be a factor. The comment above talking about sample rates is the direction I was thinking. Also I remember coming across formats other than the ubiquitous 16-bit LPCM, like 8 bit formats or mulaw and alaw, I don't know enough about those to say this is the difference I hear, but am aware that different encodings exist.