VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

This is REALLY important software nowadays imho.

I'm old enough to have spoken to people on analogue land lines: the sound was crisp, you could hear small background noises, you could hear someone breathe.

Nowadays we usually speak to people on digital lines that are highly compressed (to the extend that is messes with the sound quality), low freq range (no bass, very high sounds) and cut up (without enough sound or when then other party makes more sound the stream is completely interrupted).

And it does not have to be like this! All of this is in favour of the network operator (or centralized chat servers e.g. whatsapp) trying to save some data/money. While many of us have paid for unlimited data!

On top of that much of the conversations are not properly e2e encrypted!

I've used Mumble to speak to people I love over long distance and the quality is just so much better: it's like the analog experience of my childhood. Hearing ever breath, background noise and all in high quality makes all the difference some times.

> I'm old enough to have spoken to people on analogue land lines: the sound was crisp

You're old enough to have forgotten what land lines sounded like.

They intentionally dropped frequencies from the audio signal so that they wouldn't have to carry the data contained at those frequencies. This is why nobody ever sounded like themselves over the phone.

> They intentionally dropped frequencies from the audio signal so that they wouldn't have to carry the data contained at those frequencies. This is why nobody ever sounded like themselves over the phone.

I remember switching from early GSM phone to a landline because I like to hear my love breathe

Remember what you like. The facts are that sound over landlines was not crisp, and in fact was a train wreck.

It's particularly ridiculous that you're complaining about digital lines having a low frequency range.

Whatever you remember, it isn't reality.

I remember landlines fondly, it felt like I could hear people better back then. At the same time, I also remember the 4khz cutoff. It was the reason music sucked over landlines. Like if you were listening to music with a friend from highschool over the phone, it'd have no depth and you couldn't understand half of it from lyrics to beats. Hold music was a lot worse back then, these days it doesn't sound near as bad.

I think for a lot of us later Gen-X and older Millennials, as we age our ears don't work as well as they used to. Especially those of us like me that didn't heed good ear protection. I can't speak for everyone, but I suspect if today me tried to talk to someone on a landline back in the early 90s it'd still suck as bad as it feels like it does with cellphones today. We get more range with our phones now but our ears have a harder time processing it.

Just a thought.

Very good point – the "landline generation's" ears have aged considerably since the 90s.

On top of that, I think many remember "landline quality" in terms of a relative comparison with potato-quality early mobile phone codecs, analog mobile phones, heavily compressed discounted long-distance calling circuits etc. of the time.

Yes, landlines were better than any of that, but it doesn't mean that they were actually good by today's standards.