oh look, a feature literally no one asked for or needs.
90% of the features in your daily life started as something no one asked for or needed. I remember people saying this about touch screens.
In some applications, people still say that about touch screens and they are not wrong.
Spatial Audio can be cool. In this application? I’m unconvinced.
Fucking touchscreens on cars is definitely something nobody should have access to.
90%?
[Citation needed]
I totally wouldn’t be surprised if there originally were people being like “So what’s this so-called ‘cupboard’ supposed to solve? Why isn’t a regular shelf good enough for you?”
Was anyone asking for the telegraph before it was invented? Or the telephone? Or the Internet? Or smartphones? Or social media?
Those are not features, those are whole ass inventions
And inventions are features of your daily life. 🤦♂️
I don’t necessarily endorse the viewpoint of Noel Gallagher but it is pretty funny.
I don’t care about Spatial Audio for phone calls, but for songs and podcasts it’s AMAZING. It’s a gimmick, sure, but it’s really fucking neat.
about as necessary as 3-d televisions, which are also very neat.
I agree with you fully, but Spatial Audio is waaaay cooler than 3D TVs, and yes I did watch Avatar on a 3D TV on acid
But I really really have fun with audio. Also it’s not horridly expensive. While I’m working, I’m constantly looking around and hearing how different things are. When I had my partner try, they were like “wait can you hear this?” because it sounds like such a realistic concert performance. Artists I’ve never listened to are fascinating to me.
i went the other direction. quality means nothing, couldnt care less as long as i can hear the melody blah blah i suck. i have mp3 files that are 25 years old… guess what quality they are
You don’t suck, no way. Your opinion is the exact opposite of mine but I respect that. All of my 128kbps songs I come across I redownload in FLAC, but you’d better believe I keep my old 128kbps CD rips for nostalgia.
It’s also funny cuz even with mediocre quality songs and podcasts, head-tracked spatial is tits, looking around and having everything be… in places… and stay there? I can’t describe it but it really blew me away.
whats crazy to me is that spacial audio is the company of an app i used decades ago to run ip radio on corporate intranets (winamp+shoutcast+SAM+custom intranet site)
That IS wild! “I’M BACK, BABY”
Also the fuck kind of instance are you on
I’m into it
All I want is some kind of audio processing so people can’t tell I’m on the toilet.
It’s easier to redirect attention than to completely obscure something.
“I’M JUST STRUGGLING TO OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER! PAY NO MIND TO MY SOUNDS OF DISTRESS!” (Horrible farting sounds ensue)
Foolproof.
Nokia implemented stereo sound? Wow, welcome to 1881.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people making calls are still going to have only one speaker, so it’ll still get downmixed to mono. Even if your phone has two, and you’re not holding it next to one ear, they’re still going to be so close together as to effectively be one point source.
If only they had developed some kind of companion technology that connected to the phone and directed separate audio channels to each of your ears. Eh, such a specialized device could never gain widespread adoption if stereo phone calls were the only practical use case.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people making calls are still going to have only one speaker, so it’ll still get downmixed to mono. Even if your phone has two, and you’re not holding it next to one ear, they’re still going to be so close together as to effectively be one point source.
No, lots of (probably most) phones and other devices has stereo speakers.
Either way headphones are most often used for this (you know like the thumbnail)
This was true for TVs until it wasn’t.
Edit: apparently some young whippersnappers don’t know TVs used to be mono before they were stereo, and now some TVs even have spatial sound.
i mean, people have innovated in the areas they care already.
no one really cares that much about audio on phone calls. as long as they’re understandable.
people added video because it adds to the communication. spatial audio will not. it will only become common if one or two of these mega corps decide to shoehorn it into ever device. not because people actually want it or care.
might be a lucrative patent if we ever get holograms though
… You realize this has been innovated because someone cares, right?
Like this is such a silly argument. “Why would we make cars not use steam? If people cared about it we would have already innovated!”
it’s not that it shouldn’t be done, I’m just predicting it’s going to flop.
i mean, people have innovated in the areas they care already
so you are saying that all the innovation and research should be stopped, because if we care about any specific problem, it is already solved, and if it isn’t, it is proof we don’t care? 😆
that… is not how it works.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, I’m just predicting it’s going to flop.
yeah, because in the world of audio/video content, who would care about quality of sound, right?
and even if people would actually not care, it still doesn’t mean that someone won’t be able to sell it to them.
You think we haul 30" phones around in the foreseeable future?
You don’t need the tv for the surround sound, the speakers fit inside tiny devices you can put near each ear.
You can stream your video call to a TV right now, and spatial sound could help match the movement of the people on screen if the phone was stationary for a more immersive call.
No need to haul anything around, just some creative thinking.
No, clearly we walk around with full 5.1 surround sound speakers on poles.
Not the first, teamspeak has had a spatial audio api for a long time
Teamspeak isn’t using the phone. It’s TCP/IP.
You’re gonna need to unpack what you mean here because TCP/IP is the basis for pretty much everything, even modern phones
Phones, like landline phones or when you’re not using wifi calling, use a totally different method of communication than the internet. VoIP and WiFi calling do not use the phone part, they use the internet and are a completely different protocol/method.
Alrighty let’s learn some vocab
POTS lines, aka plain old telephone system, are what you’re referring to when you say landlines
When you’re calling off of Wi-Fi, most of the time you’re using a technology called VoLTE- Voice over LTE, which still functions on top of TCP/IP
The difference that matters here is the VoIP and VoLTE, as well as Wi-Fi calling are all digital protocols over TCP/IP networks.
If you really wanna get specific, most digital phone systems use protocols called Telephony, and SIP(session initiation protocol)
I work in telecommunications. This is pretty much exactly correct.
Not really a rebuttal to anything you said, but to expand on the fact that WiFi calling uses VoLTE “most of the time”, which is true because in some conditions SIP is used, but if you are using an Android or iOS phone, you are always using a modem, the voice line is never analog, and all digital voice communications are sent over TCP/IP.
Shame the article was talking about a mobile phone or that point would have mattered…
Currently, all phone calls made over a cellular network are monophonic, meaning audio is compressed into a single channel
This bit from the article is what I am trying to convey. Teamspeak doesn’t use whatever phones use when you make a phone call, even if it’s a cell phone. Cell phones do not have to do this. They have the bandwidth for stereo phone calls and yet, so far, they still compress it into garbage unless you’re using a VOIP app or Wifi calling on both ends.
Oh man, wait till you learn how today’s phones work…
For years we invested in better microphones and noise canceling to CLEARLY hear the closest / primary speaker and remove all other noise and distractions.
Now introducing, car noise. Get immerses with the kids fighting in the back seat in surround sound…
No important conference call is complete without you providing your weekly update while your dog licks his balls on the way to the vet for everyone to hear.
Useless.
Incorrect. This will better train LLMs since they can detect distinct speakers/sounds more easily and thus applying the proper metadata tags and profile information at a more accurate clip.
All so they can deliver more ads!
I wish it was only useless:(
Not everything that will be useful has an immediately obvious benefit.
The only benefit this has is to those who will upcharge to use it. It’s pointless crap nobody asked for.
If it improves video calls and regular calls, why not? I can definitely see room for improvement in audio quality when calling and would be happy to have a better experience.
At least in the United States, when you call somebody on the same carrier as you, you get that HD quality thing, and that improves the call quality a bunch versus the standard 8KB phone call. However, even still, when you call somebody on another carrier, you generally don’t get that high quality call. So it would be nice to get those high quality calls between carriers for everybody before moving on.
Do you mean VoLTE? It should work between different carriers afaik
Voice over LTE and high definition calling is actually not the same thing. You can have a voice over LTE call and not have the high quality audio calling. All Voice over LTE actually does is make your call into packets between you and your providers network instead of setting up a circuit like they used to.
Lol yeah everyone shitting on stereo is shooting in the wrong direction - companies suck, stereo or surround sound doesn’t. Not saying it’s a super high priority for me, but another channel of audio isn’t going to use much bandwidth, we already listen to streaming music in stereo all the time.
So instead of playing bad music, I can get ASMR while I’m on hold with my bank?
Finally, ASMR phone calls.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It placed the call over a cellular network using the 3GPP Immersive Video and Audio Services (IVAS) codec, allowing callers to hear “sound spatially in real-time.”
The IVAS codec is part of 5G Advanced, an upcoming upgrade to 5G networks that could offer faster speeds, improved energy efficiency, more accurate cellular-based positioning, and more.
Currently, all phone calls made over a cellular network are monophonic, meaning audio is compressed into a single channel.
Spatial audio, on the other hand, makes it seem like sounds are coming from different directions as they’re delivered through multiple channels.
The IVAS codec could enable spatial audio in a “vast majority” of smartphones with at least two microphones, Nokia tells Reuters.
But, as pointed out by Reuters, we likely won’t see the more immersive audio and video calls on our cellular networks for a few more years.
The original article contains 228 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 38%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Okay?
“A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular”
