Tag: sound

On the quality of voice in the phone conversation

Tom Evslin has this interesting observation about the quality of voice in the traditional phone:

The bandwidth of the telephone connection between our homes and the telephone network hasn’t changed in my long lifetime. Although some noise has been eliminated in long distance calls (sometime and if we’re not on a cellphone), voices on the phone still sound like they did sixty-five years ago. We’ve trained ourselves to accept the clipped quality of a telephone voice with its lack of emotional overtones.
You wouldn’t dream of listening to music over the phone. You expect and get much better sound quality from almost any radio and on TV. Movies have Dolby sound. But the telephone is still the telephone.

He suggests that VoIP (think: Skype) is changing that.

Doing something wrong

I am really doing something wrong. Seriously. I can’t get neigther one of headsets to work. Headphones work just fine, both at home and at work. Microphones don’t. At work I can hear myself talking in the headphones, but I can’t record any sound and, obviously, I can’t use the headset in Skype. At home, I don’t even get the sound in the headphones.

I think I’m getting old… Oh, do I sound like my father now?

Again with an ‘S’ word

This is yet another post that mentions Skype. As you probably know by now after reading this and that posts, I am really enjoying Skype.

In order to expand the joy, I decided to follow my brother, and buy headphones with microphone to use voice features of this application.

You might think that I am one of those “whatever my brother gets, I’ll get two” types, but I am not. I really have two very separate computers – my home workstation and my office workstation – that I need to equip with whatever software and hardware I use. So, I bought two headsets. Those are A4Tech HS-7 if you are interested.

8 CYP a piece. Fit my head nicely. Micrphone is attached via a wire that you can bend any way you like. There is also volume control and microphone on/off switch right on the wire. Comfy.

I haven’t tested the sound yet.

Excellent SMS notification ringtone

With all the sounds out there I was surprised at how difficult it was to find good ringtone for SMS notification. All of them are either too noisy, or too long, or too disturbing, or too complicated. Finally, I came across one that really suits me well – sound of 50 cent coin (WAV, 300 KBytes).