David Frankel’s ZipDX is the topic of an article over at Telephony Online. VUC regulars have been able to enjoy the benefits of the ZipDX wideband conference bridge for the past couple of months. The company has offered up their conference bridge to users who have the necessary phones to join the call in G.722-based wideband.
Ok, this is going to be a rant. Consider yourselves warned. And worse than that, it’s more or less a repeat of a rant from not long ago. The theme is essentially “Eating Our Own Dog Food” and it harkens back to thoughts of the Emperors New Clothes, or perhaps the state of the mechanics own car.
To what I am I referring? Well, in this case it’s the Squawk Box podcast from Feb 29. The topic was, netbooks vs smart phones and was extremely interesting. However the call, and resulting podcast, was also profoundly aggravating.
This past week Polycom announced a new device they call the VVX-1500 Business Media Phone. Combining the telephony features of the SoundPoint IP650 with a camera & touchscreen LCD but still in a desktop form factor, it looks to be a true business class desktop videophone.
(this started as a quick comment on my Facebook page, but I’m moving it here so that people outside of FaceBook can join in)
With apologies to the McKenzie brothers. There appears to be an odd cross between two of my passions in the works. As I get more into the daily use of wideband telephony I wonder if there’s a potential to leverage some surround sound techniques to take conferencing to a new level?
It couldn’t be the puritanical kind of approach used in music recording. It would be more a matter of using surround panning to position participants in an synthetic soundfield. I wonder if this has been done to any degree elsewhere?
The past few weeks the blogosphere has been alight with the conjecture that “VoIP is dead.” A great many have weighed in with opinion on the matter, including; Alec Saunders, Andy Abramson, Dan York*, Ken Camp, Jon Arnold, Irwin Lazar, Om Malik, Tom Keating, amongst others. And a little unexpectedly, Jeff Pulver joined in on the conversation.
All of this seems to have culminated in a Calliflower conference call the evening of Monday January 5th. Those in attendance (39 people!) were essentially the most respected folks in the VoIP blogosphere. The debate was interesting but nothing I care to comment on here. The call is available as a podcast. It’s a good listen.
As expected the VUC call on Nov 7 about wideband VoIP proved very interesting. It was well attended with a dozen participants on the ZipDX wideband bridge and another twenty on the Talkshoe narrowband conference bridge. Our guest, David Frankel of ZipDX, did a good job of introducing wideband telephony, it’s advantages and some of the issues surrounding its implementation.
We recorded the call in several places so that we have both wideband and narrowband recordings available for comparison after the fact. History has shown that many people download the conference recordings, even many months after the original conference date. It’s evidence of “the long tail” phenomenon that we hear about so often.
However, some people are very visual so I thought I’d bolster the archive recordings by doing some simple visual analysis of the spectral energy distribution in each type of call. Happily, Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) makes it really simple to generate both waveform and spectral views of an audio clip.