Howie Rose & Joy of Sound

The late 20th and early 21st century are seeing the triumph of the image again. That’s why even podcasts are being converted to video these days. People want to see the face on the screen — even the tiny one on their cellphones. I think I know why. The sound sucks.

I wish my children had more occasion to hear the previous era, when a single voice could carry a medium all by itself — the analog era. I can’t believe how old I sound when I say things like, “Back when I was a kid, people actually enjoyed phone calls.” There was a time before internet communications chopped us into bits and packets — subject to jitter and a long latency of 100 to 300 milliseconds, leading to miscommunication. Back then we had telephone wires, and real microphones and receivers. The mic voltage translated into line voltage and became the speaker’s motion on the other end. Traditional phones fed your ear a controlled sidetone to allow you to hear yourself speaking. The effect was to make a telephone conversation feel as if the two rooms the participants conducted it from had been physically joined up. By comparison, a cellphone call still feels like shouting into unreverberant blackness, then waiting for a response through it.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

Featured Tags

Manage following

Baseball

MLB

The late 20th and early 21st century are seeing the triumph of the image again. That’s why even podcasts are being converted to video these days. People want to see the face on the screen — even the tiny one on their cellphones. I think I know why. The sound sucks.

I wish my children had more occasion to hear the previous era, when a single voice could carry a medium all by itself — the analog era. I can’t believe how old I sound when I say things like, “Back when I was a kid, people actually enjoyed phone calls.” There was a time before internet communications chopped us into bits and packets — subject to jitter and a long latency of 100 to 300 milliseconds, leading to miscommunication. Back then we had telephone wires, and real microphones and receivers. The mic voltage translated into line voltage and became the speaker’s motion on the other end. Traditional phones fed your ear a controlled sidetone to allow you to hear yourself speaking. The effect was to make a telephone conversation feel as if the two rooms the participants conducted it from had been physically joined up. By comparison, a cellphone call still feels like shouting into unreverberant blackness, then waiting for a response through it.