This morning’s email reveals that Daily Steals is offering the Plantronics Savor M1100 BT headset for a rather modest $20. While not a device that I’ve tried myself the M1100 was well reviewed by TMC back in 2012 when it…
Do you remember way back when VUC calls were don using Talkshoe? That was the service that Randulo used to create the VUC, and it remained the primary conference used until the end of 2008. It was in November 2008 that I arranged to have David Frankel of ZipDX make a VUC guest appearance.
David’s visit was unusual in that we used it as an opportunity to expose the assembled audience to conferencing using HDVoice. David was kind enough to provide some licenses for Counterpath’s G.722-capable Eyebeam soft phone. This allowed us to have a dozen people on ZipDX in HDVoice, while the rest of the audience remained on Talkshoe. You can still listen to the archived recording of the call if you’d like.
Monday afternoon an email arrived announcing E4 Technology’s new promotion of the Polycom VVX Series desk phones. As I am a huge fan of the VVX Series I thought this worth sharing.
You may recall that I long ago reviewed the VVX-1500. It remains the single best sounding desk phone that I have ever used!
However, I recently replaced the VVX-1500 that had occupied the corner of my desk with a VVX-600 model. The VVX-600 is much smaller and sounds almost as good as it’s larger kin. It’s Bluetooth capable, which is certainly handy. With the optional camera module installed the touchscreen VVX-600 is capable of HD video (720p).
Last week there was some exciting news on the AG Projects mailing list; Blink support for the Opus codec was being released for the Mac version of Blink. A similarly capable release of the Windows version was expected shortly. Earlier this week Adrian Georgescu, the A. G. of AG Projects, passed me a Blink for Windows release candidate for experimental use.
This beta release installed readily, right along side the production release. I quickly registered it with my account at SIP2SIP.INFO so that we could have a couple of brief test calls.
Since most telephony oriented audio hardware doesn’t do justice to full-bandwidth audio I connected my Blue Microphones Yeti USB Microphone
I’ve recently started to develop a grumpy streak with respect to the use of certain terminology with respect to telephony. Maybe telephony isn’t exactly the right word, let’s say that my unease arises from some odd terms surrounding audio quality in the context of communication. I think that some of the language needs to be more application sensitive.
A few years ago the world was a simpler place. The “Plain Old Telephone System” (aka POTS) was definitely a narrowband medium. Where “narrowband” implied digital sampling at 8 KHz and a useful audio channel of 300 Hz – 3,400 Hz.
Some people using more advanced systems enjoyed “wideband” audio. Wideband in that case was defined as a 16 KHz sampling yielding a useful audio channel of 50 Hz – 7 KHz. The TIA-920 standard, which I have referenced previously, spells this out. A variety of audio codecs can deliver this capability including; AMR-WB, EVRC-WB, G.722, G.722.1, CELT & Opus.
One of the first interesting things to arise out of this weeks WebRTC conference in Atlanta is an announcement from Audio Codes that they will be adding support for the Opus codec to their 400HD series of SIP desk phones. Here’s the press release.
There seems to be a little confusion about what’s actually going to be offered. The title of the release states, “AudioCodes Announces WebRTC Phone.” The copy goes on to describe that the hardware will be extended to provide native support the Opus codec. This capability is projected to be deliverable in Q4-2013.