Telephone colophon: Or, how I overengineered my call audio (2020)(noahliebman.net) |
Telephone colophon: Or, how I overengineered my call audio (2020)(noahliebman.net) |
It's technically feasible, apps that can do this have existed for years[1,2,3], but they're either non-free or kludgy and unintuitive as hell.
At this point, It's definitely a UX problem, not a "we don't have the tech to do this" problem.
Analog phones in the 80s sounded better than almost anything a typical consumer is likely to interact with these days[4]. Now, it's all crappy 16kHZ Bluetooth headsets, bad noise / echo cancellation everywhere, and all that encoded with some low-quality opus.
nobody seems to care about this very much. We now have devices that can go up to a few hundred mb/s over WiFi, yet Bluetooth hasn't changed much since 20 years ago, and the audio quality is basically what it was back then.
[1] https://bearware.dk [2] https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_arti... [3] https://cleanfeed.net/ [4] https://evan-doorbell.com/wp-content/uploads/Overview-rough....
For my mic I have also an sm57 feeding into a dbx286 hardware mic preamp and dynamics. Then feeding that into my audio interface for calls that also gives me a knob to mix in my mic into my headphone signal. This all gives me zero latency monitoring off all the gates and compression. Then for the output signal I have a seperate audio interface I use with all the web calling applications that sends the audio of all other people in the call to o another compressor that levels out their volumes. Then that is sent through a tc electronic multiband compressor unit to fix the really dull mics some people have. This is then mixed with the stereo output of all other applications on my audio interface again.
This way I have consistent audio no matter what OS I'm booted into at that moment.
since it's convenient to use the headphone out on the uv1 for the headset, i do use a limiter plugin in Rogue Amoeba Soundsource to compress the output from the conferencing software we use, it's nice being able to do that per-application since i listen to music through the headset a lot and don't want to have to take the limiter in and out.
analog headsets are so much less annoying and flexible, huge fan
I'm sure in practice you can't have a jam session more than 50ms or so away from your bandmates before the latency starts becoming very noticeable.
And if I'm not able to lug that brick I can just plug the headset directly into my laptop.