HD Voice
HD Voice (High Definition Voice): Skype has always been associated with providing excellent voice quality. Skype’s HD Voice results in a much clearer and crisper conversation, especially between parties who are on Skype itself. If you use a stereo headset you would say the other party is almost “in your head”. Voice quality is reduced when making a SkypeOut call to a PSTN landline or, even worse, to a mobile device due to limitations imposed by the audio infrastructure design parameters of the PSTN and mobile networks.
Terms such as wideband audio have also been associated with describing Skype’s voice quality but, while Skype was a pioneer in providing such quality, others involved in telephony also are building hardware and softphones which provide this level of quality; as a result the generic term has become HD Voice.
HD Voice basically means an telephone system that communicates >8KHz of audio. While the human ear can theoretically hear out to 22KHz, most “talk” voice audio is below 8KHz; you only need the higher frequencies when you are listening to music or related audio sources.
Achieving this bandwidth involves not only the sound engine in the softphone (such as the Skype client) and the sound chip in PC hardware but also ensuring the microphone and speakers can handle that bandwidth. Ever wonder why mobile phones sound so squeaky? They are designed to handle around 2 KHz of audio bandwidth; the legacy telephone system only communicates 3.7 KHz audio. The end result of HD Voice, in addition to much crisper and clearer audio, also reduces the need to question speech that is associated with various accents and tonal inflections. For customer service operation it means many fewer “Could you repeat that” interruptions and other misunderstandings caused by the narrower bandwidth of familiar telephone hardware. But the final proof is in the conversational experience.
For more see HD Voice: Priceless and Tom Evslin’s description and experience with a call from Vermont to Israel.
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Hi,
We have obtained a Linux version of AQuA software that can test HD Voice audio and codecs. So far the results are good, but the trial period will be over soon and I would like to ask if you have tested this software for HD Voice quality monitoring. If you experienced its applicability to automated Skype calls testing that would be great. Thanks a lot in advance!
Best regards,
Walter
P. S. Hope this is not against the rules, here is the link to the software page:
http://www.sevana.fi/voice_quality_testing_measurement_analysis.php
Can any third party comment on this? Thanks..