Graves On SOHO Technology

Having read & listened this far into this series you should now have some grasp of how narrowband (G.711) compares to wideband (G.722/G.722.1) and even super-wideband (G.722.1C) audio for telephony applications. The differences in many cases are quite pronounced, even startling. What you hear in the examples are just the most obvious properties of the encoding, sampling rate and by implication, the available audio bandwidth. It’s worth understanding a bit more about the evolution of the role of the codec over time. This will help you frame up how the Siren codecs fit into the Asterisk realm.

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Over the past year I’ve become acutely aware of the problems possible with blog hosts. Even the good ones have trouble periodically. I’m not seriously unhappy with my current hosting company, but I am wondering what’s better. I’m inclined to think that a bone fide dedicated server shared by a handful of users would be better than my current arrangement.

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This mornings attempt to get through my backlog in Google Reader turns up two interesting and kinda related news items. First, Kingston Technologies has introduced a line of low-end solid state disks (SSDs) called the SSDNow V Series. A 40 GB model in the 2.5″ laptop form factor retails for a modest $85, and of course the specs are much better than any comparable spinning magnetic media.

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In this third installment I’ll try to broaden your experience with wideband and super-wideband telephony by exposing you to a selection of recorded audio samples using various encoding techniques.

Until now the examples used were strictly in English. This next set of six samples recordings are in six different languages; Norwegian, Chinese, French, German, Russian & Spanish. Each is presented in a comparative form, with three codecs intercut into one example recording. Then again in each of the following; uncompressed, super-wideband (G.722.1C), wideband (G.722/G.722.1) and finally narrowband (G.711) a la PSTN.

I could have assembled all of this into a tight little library using Flash or some Javascript, but I decided that it would be better presented laid out across a number of pages in a very plain and simple form. This way you know for certain exactly what you’re hearing and seeing in each case. There’s no active logic in the background except for a little MP3 player embedded in the page.

In order to truly appreciate the difference between the various recordings you will need to be making use of high-quality audio playback hardware. Good quality computer speakers or, better yet, a high-quality headset will be the most revealing. But then, as someone who’s genuinely concerned about the quality of audio over IP telephony…you knew that, right? I thought so.

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This year marks the first time that I have attended Astricon. This is mildly paradoxical since Asterisk hasn’t been at the core of my IP telephony activities for a while. However, the opportunity to talk about HDVoice with a group of Asterisk users was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

My experience of Astricon was better than I had expected on a number of levels. Meeting up with  a number of the VUC regulars was probably the highlight of the event. Though we might speak every week or so to have a sit down and talk in one location remains a treat. Meatspace still trumps cyberspace in some ways.

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In part 1 I gave you an introduction to Polycom’s Siren7 & 14 codecs, as well as a brief overview of their implementation in Asterisk v1.6. Now  it makes some sense to try and understand their advantages in use. This is really a more generalized exploration of narrowband (G.711 ala PSTN) vs wideband (G.722/G.722.1) vs Super-Wideband (G.722.1C)

I set about creating a series of audio recordings to illustrate the difference between the three codecs. If Asterisk had been capable of handling all three codecs then recording samples encoded in each fashion would have been relatively simple. The trouble is that in the period leading up to Astricon I didn’t yet have a version of Asterisk capable of handling Siren streams beyond pass through.

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