Wideband audio

Wideband audio, also known as wideband voice or HD voice, is high definition voice quality for telephony audio, contrasted with standard digital telephony "toll quality". It extends the frequency range of audio signals transmitted over telephone lines, resulting in higher quality speech. The range of the human voice extends from 80 Hz to 14 kHz but traditional, voiceband or narrowband telephone calls limit audio frequencies to the range of 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz. Wideband audio relaxes the bandwidth limitation and transmits in the audio frequency range of 50 Hz to 7 kHz or even up to 22 kHz.[1] In addition, some wideband codecs may use a higher audio bit depth of 16-bits to encode samples, also resulting in much better voice quality.

History

In 1987, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standardized a version of wideband audio known as G.722. Radio broadcasters began using G.722 over Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) to provide high-quality audio for remote broadcasts, such as commentary from sports venues. AMR-WB (G.722.2) was developed by Nokia and VoiceAge and it was first specified by 3GPP.

The traditional telephone network (PSTN) is generally limited to narrowband audio by the intrinsic nature of its transmission technology, TDM (time-division multiplexing), and by the analogue-to-digital converters used at the edge of the network, as well as the speakers, microphones and other elements in the endpoints themselves.

Wideband audio has been broadly deployed in conjunction with videoconferencing. Providers of this technology quickly discovered that despite the explicit emphasis on video transmission, the quality of the participant experience was significantly influenced by the fidelity of the associated audio signal.

Communications via Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can readily employ wideband audio. When PC-to-PC calls are placed via VoIP services, such as Skype, and the participants use a high-quality headset, the resulting call quality can be noticeably superior to conventional PSTN calls. A number of audio codecs have emerged to support these services, supplementing G.722.

Manufacturers of audio conferencing equipment have introduced wideband-capable models that include support for G.722 over VoIP.

Conference calls are a direct beneficiary of the enhancements offered by wideband audio. Participants often struggle to figure out who is talking or to understand accented speakers. Misunderstandings are commonplace due primarily to generally poor audio quality and accumulation of background noise.

Some listener benefits cited of wideband audio compared to traditional (narrowband):

  • Clearer overall sound quality
  • Easier to recognize voices, distinguish confusing sounds and understand accented speakers
  • Ease of deciphering words that have the close sounds of ‘s’ and ‘f’ and others, often indistinguishable over telephone lines
  • Ability to hear faint talkers and to understand double-talk (when more than one person is speaking at the same time)
  • Reduced listening effort (decreased cognitive load), resulting in increased productivity and lessened listener fatigue
  • Better understanding amidst other impairments, such as when talkers are using a speakerphone or in the presence of background noise

Despite its reputation for poor audio quality, the mobile telephone industry has started to make some progress on wideband audio. The 3GPP standards group has designated G.722.2 as its wideband codec and calls it Adaptive Multirate – Wideband (AMR-WB). More than a hundred handsets have been introduced supporting this codec (for example, Apple, Google, HTC, Nokia, Samsung and Sony), and network demonstrations have been conducted.

Deployment

As business telephone systems have adopted VoIP technology, support for wideband audio has grown rapidly. Telephone sets from Avaya, Cisco, NEC Unified Solutions, Grandstream, Gigaset, Panasonic (which brands wideband audio "HD Sonic"), Polycom (which brands wideband audio "HD Voice"), Snom, AudioCodes (which brands wideband audio "HDVoIP") and others now incorporate G.722, as well as varying degrees of higher-quality audio components. AMR-WB is natively supported in Android since Android Gingerbread,[2] and in iOS since the iPhone 5.[3]

Suppliers of integrated circuits for telephony equipment, including DSP Group, Broadcom, Infineon, and Texas Instruments, include wideband audio in their feature portfolios. There are audio conferencing service providers that support wideband connections from these and other VoIP endpoints, while also permitting PSTN participants to join the conference in narrowband. sipXtapi is an open-source solution for VoIP media processing engine supporting wideband and HD voice that provides RTP and codecs through a plugin framework for use with SIP and other VoIP protocols. Skype uses an audio codec called Silk which allows for extremely high-quality audio.

A number of carriers around the world have rolled out HD voice services based on the G.722 wideband standard. In North America, hosted service providers have recently deployed the Aastra Hi-Q upgrade to its installed user base and as of January 2010 claimed around 70,000 HD voice endpoints. The consumer service provider ooma has an estimated 25,000 HD voice endpoints deployed stemming from its rollout of its second-generation Telo hardware.

As of December 2015, a report announces 117 commercial mobile HD Voice networks launched in 76 countries.[4]

Many mobile networks including AT&T[5] and Verizon are discontinuing support for phones that don't support 4G and wideband audio.

Wideband audio coding standards

The following are wideband audio coding standards and audio codecs used in telecommunication.[6]

ITU-T
Year Wideband audio coding standard Wideband speech coding algorithm Ref
1988 G.722 SB-ADPCM [7]
1999 G.722.1 (Siren7) MDCT [8]
2003 G.722.2 (Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband) ACELP [9]
2006 G.729.1 MDCT [10]
2008 G.711.1 MDCT [11]
G.718 MDCT [12]

GSMA

3GPP

Others

References
  1. "Answering the call of HD Voice". Global IP Sound. Retrieved 2009-09-06.
  2. "MediaRecorder.AudioEncoder". Android Developers.
  3. Buster Hein (13 September 2012). "The iPhone 5 Supports HD Voice, But You'll Never Get To Use It In The U.S."
  4. "Mobile HD Voice: Global Update report". GSA. 2014-09-19. Retrieved 2014-09-24.
  5. "Get Ready, 3G is Going Away in 2022". AT&T.
  6. "Which wideband codec to choose?". TMCnet. Retrieved 2012-11-13.
  7. ITU-T G.722 page ITU-T Recommendation G.722 (11/88), "7 kHz audio-coding within 64 kbit/s"
  8. Lutzky, Manfred; Schuller, Gerald; Gayer, Marc; Krämer, Ulrich; Wabnik, Stefan (May 2004). A guideline to audio codec delay (PDF). 116th AES Convention. Fraunhofer IIS. Audio Engineering Society. Retrieved 24 October 2019.
  9. ACELP map, VoiceAge Corporation
  10. Nagireddi, Sivannarayana (2008). VoIP Voice and Fax Signal Processing. John Wiley & Sons. p. 69. ISBN 9780470377864.
  11. Sasaki, Shigeaki; Mori, Takeshi; Hiwasaki, Yusuke; Ohmuro, Hitoshi (August 2008). "Global Standard for Wideband Speech Coding: ITU-T G.711.1 (G.711 wideband extension)". NTT Technical Review. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.
  12. "ITU-T Work Programme". ITU.
  13. "HD Voice". Future Networks. Retrieved 2020-05-10.
  14. "Enhanced Voice Services Codec for LTE". www.3gpp.org. Retrieved 2020-05-10.
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