Cellphones and Audio (was Ghost Click, though I got no idea why)

Thu May 3 16:44:20 UTC 2012

Jay Ashworth wrote:

>> Googling "PCM adult male voice", "4kHz adult male" and similar isn't
>> finding me anything. Was I told nonsense?
> 

[snippage]

> What might be the case is that you'd 
> have more trouble *distinguishing* amongst women, or between women and 
> children, because the tones necessary for that are more located above the
> cutoff frequency.

Thank you for this and the link. Very interesting stuff. I have never 
tried to check to what extent I / others can distinguish different 
female / young speakers on the phone. I shall try to pay more attention 
to this in the future.

  > In short: it depends a lot on what you mean by 'serves well'.  :-)

Well, just the above seems like enough that you'd think there'd be more 
(justified) grumbling that thanks to a choice made many many decades ago 
it's harder to distinguish young or female speakers than it is adult 
male ones. Maybe there is and I've just not noticed it. Is this one of 
the things pushing adoption of higher bandwidth audio codecs? (My guess: 
no.)