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Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

I can understand people just fine with the voice profiles provided by Bluetooth. Strictly speaking, I don't need anything better than that.

But it sure is nice to be able to make phone calls where people don't sound worse than they did with digitally-switched analog landline telephones in 1995. Bluetooth doesn't get there at all.

The losses of Bluetooth even compound generationally: The inescapable tin-can audio of Bluetooth at one end first gets transmogrified by at least one intermediate lossy codec for transmission across/betwixt the network(s), and then gets tin-canned harder when the far end of the connection is also using Bluetooth.

For perspective: 1995's phone calls were ultimately limited by the G.711 codec, which itself dates to 1972. I'm not setting the bar very high here at all.

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Calls on AirPods don’t sound worse to me than on the phone speakers, I don’t think the AirPods noticeably decrease the quality compared to the stuff happening on the phone network.

"The phone network"? As in the usually 8 kHz to 16 kHz quality call typically encoding at ~a quarter the rate of dial-up?

Of course that sounds like a tin can either way, it's coming in encoded with the quality of a tin can! People here are talking about modern VoIP calls (Teams/Slack/Discord/Zoom/etc) which have a snowball's chance in hell of sounding decent in the first place. HSP/HFP will often crank that right back down to traditional phone network quality again. You also lose stereo, which isn't so bad if the only thing you're doing is having a 1:1 call but kind of sucks for a background group call.

I mean: I, for one, was definitely talking about telephone calls. :)

But now that you mention it: Yeah, the state of common VoIP (Teams/Slack/Zoom/whatever) is also usually not very good. It's like there's some huge bandwidth crunch here in 2026 that is driven by the strenuous demands of VoIP, except: There isn't.

When I was doing some live streaming with others in a studio a couple of years ago, we worked with some of that. It never sounded very good. (It doesn't sound very good when the big-time acts at CBS or NPR or Fox News do it, either.)

But! When we occasionally had remote co-hosts who had enough technical competence to make it work properly on their end, we were able to use SonoBus[1]. That audio was positively pristine, like they were sitting unseen in the same room as everyone else.

[1]: https://www.sonobus.net/

The "phone network" nowadays offer high quality sound. Things improved drastically with VoLTE and other technologies which allows much more bandwidth for calls than the old networks could support.

EVS is typically not horrendous, I just wouldn't describe it as the usual VoLTE quality yet. That's still most commonly AMR-WB at 16 kHz, though it'd depend largely on who you're dialing from what where I suppose. One person who dials local cell users on a 5G network will probably tend to get EVS, one who doesn't probably won't.

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