Questioning New Dimensions In Conference Audio
I’ve long had a fascination with spatial audio processing. This was in part why Voxeet caught my attention when the service initially launched. It was over a year before we were able to have them appear on VUC #471 on January 10th.
From that session you may recall that Voxeet offers a binaural conference service. Participants join a conference using a PC smart phone application. They use a stereo headset allowing the client application to provide placement of the individual participants within a controlled sound stage.
Voxeet is interesting. However, it’s not exactly clear what aspect of the service is most compelling. At point of launch they used the Speex audio codec, which allows wideband audio (aka HDVoice.)
In the recent v2 release their PC client has been moved to a WebRTC foundation, leveraging Opus. I’ve done a quick analysis of their updated online demo. Newly fitted with American voices where there were once French accents, it presents 16 KHz usable audio path, suggesting a 32 KHz sample rate. It certainly sounds very good.
Sometimes people take the shortest or cheapest path when it really doesn’t serve them well. So it was for my employer. For the past year or more the IVR menu at our main US number was voiced by the CEO of our US operation. Not that his voice is bad, but he’s an ex-pat Englishman with an accent that emphasizes the fact that we’re not a US-based company.
For this one call only we will also be using the ZipDX wideband conference bridge. ZipDX and Talkshoe will be connected so that everyone will be on the call. Anyone connected to the ZipDX bridge using a suitable phone will be able to experience the call in G.722-based wideband quality.