Reminds of of working with ISDN lines to board eons ago ;)
Telephone colophon: Or, how I overengineered my call audio (2020)
11–13 of 13 posts
Re: Telephone colophon: Or, how I overengineered my call audio (2020)
#12That's a lot of software setup for something that can easily be done in hardware. I've been over engineering things for years now. For my mic I have also an sm57 feeding into a dbx286 hardware mic preamp and dynamics. Then feeding that into my audio interface for calls that also gives me a knob to mix in my mic into my headphone signal. This all gives me zero latency monitoring off all the gates and compression. Then…
i'm also an audio nerd and although I do everything in the box when i'm recording, i agree completely that it's way easier to use outboard stuff for this case. i had an analog channel strip but decided to try one of the very inexpensive behringer uv1 strips with an integrated usb interface and it's been great, the gate and compressor work well, and i have a rolls audio parametric eq in the effects loop to high pass and de-essing.
since it's convenient to use the headphone out on the uv1 for the headset, i do use a limiter plugin in Rogue Amoeba Soundsource to compress the output from the conferencing software we use, it's nice being able to do that per-application since i listen to music through the headset a lot and don't want to have to take the limiter in and out.
analog headsets are so much less annoying and flexible, huge fan
Re: Telephone colophon: Or, how I overengineered my call audio (2020)
#13I really wish it was easier to do high-quality audio calls these days. It's technically feasible, apps that can do this have existed for years[1,2,3], but they're either non-free or kludgy and unintuitive as hell. At this point, It's definitely a UX problem, not a "we don't have the tech to do this" problem. Analog phones in the 80s sounded better than almost anything a typical consumer is likely to interact with the…
It still positively mystifies me why the only actually lossless codec used for getting data to and from a headset / earpiece wirelessly is the extremely underadopted and proprietary aptX Lossless. Like I just cannot for the life of me understand why is it so difficult to push ~2.3 megabits/sec (48 KHz, 16-bit stereo listen + same but mono mic) wirelessly in the big 2025.
Bluetooth has low bandwidth. Classic Bluetooth is 1 Mbps. Bluetooth LE can do 2 Mbps. LE Audio was introduced in Bluetooth 5.3 and starting to show up in headphones. I think LE Audio supports high quality bidirectional so that should solve the poor headset problem.