Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I remember voice clarity being exceptional on old handsets and being really subpar on gsm and later. Only now we FaceTime voice and discord the quality seems to be coming back.

How can that be if the speakers in phones ubiquitously were so bad?

View on HN

My understanding is that at some point the audio of phone calls ended up being compressed multiple times on its way to the receiver as it went through different voip setups and such.

Prior to that, uncompressed or compressed once calls weren't so bad on bad speakers.

Could be that it wasn’t bad but has gotten bad because of aging of the speaker, capacitors, resistors, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com