Sound Quality and Compression

[dctmpeg]

True, it's not as bad as I thought. I think a lot of it is the phone. For example... with my Atrix, I can usually tell when I am stuck in GSM AMR Half-Rate at 7.4kbps as opposed to 12.2K. (I am stuck on EDGE all the time. The 3G rollout here is piecemeal at best... with serious signal issues in the exact same fashion as when it was GSM only. Lol...) But if I throw in my SIM into an old LG-CU400 and ensure AMR is turned on, the difference is much more subtle.

The other consideration is whether or not AT&T is utilizing some form of transcoder free operation on 3G. I have no idea whether or not mobile to mobile calls have to go:

AMR 12.2K <or> 5.9K ---> G.711 ->>> AMR 12K <or> 5.9K (To the other mobile device).

Or, if it's something like:

AMR 12.2K <or> 5.9K ------> AMR voice shifted over the network, errors filled in ----> Other mobile device.

My understanding that GSM-EFR was designed to withstand EFR->G.711->EFR and still sound okay. I would imagine much lower bitrate codecs can run into problems. That being said, 5.9 to a landline is pretty good. 12.2 even better.

[GSMinCT]

What phone are u using? Sound quality is greatly affected by the device and if u r using Bluetooth then that is another call quality problem in itself.

In the iPhone call quality comparison Sprint was rated the highest, ATT second, vzw last....and I think sprint only won in outgoing quality, and was second to ATT in incoming.

Generally for me ATT has been great on 3G....just made a call to my sister today who is on a Q9h with crystal talk and she sounded awesome on it!

Sent from my Nexus One using HowardForums

That sounds spot on with my experience... Sprint and AT&T are pretty good, Verizon is a mess. I think AT&T on the iPhone 4S is actually pretty good, although it probably could be better... Verizon, however, does the best job designing their phones for good voice quality, even if it gets murdered on the network, and the 4S carried that engineering over to AT&T.