Time to sort out condenser Mics on Mobile phones…
By Ben Robinson on Saturday, September 12th, 2009 at 11:12 AM PST In Ideas and rants
I’m travelling this weekend, at an Exhibition somewhere in Europe (where and what ain’t that important) – and I’m getting killed for sound on Mobile calls to/from people by the background noise!
I’m sure many of you have experienced this incredibly frustrating trend, whereby either you are trying to talk to someone (in which case the person you are speaking to can’t hear you), or you are taking a call from someone in a relatively noisy environment, and in fact all you get is warped background noise invading over the audio that should be the person’s voice!
I find it’s particularly band when you have:
- train station or airport announcements
- constant background noise e.g. the hubbub of people talking
- traffic passing nearby e.g. street full of cars
The culprit in the main is the condenser mic, that works on the principle of gathering sound from the surrounding environment, of which in theory, your voice should be the loudest.
However, due to the frequencies captured, the technology used, and also the limitations of GSM/UMTS voice carriage across networks, what you can often get is capture of the situational audio around you, leading to some nice audio FX in your/your recipient’s call!
It’s an incredibly frustrating, and one that hasn’t been too well addressed by Mobile device makers. Ironically, some Bluetooth headset vendors have had a go at solving it, but the leaders here appear to be Digital Video Camera makers, who have found a way to isolate the noise of the wind for example, if you’ve strapped your camcorder to a bike, and are riding along! Okay, that’s an extreme use-case, but you get the general idea of removing the extraneous audio…
The thing I am wondering is why no-one has made a better stab at this on Mobile devices to-date. At some point we’ll move to networks that include “HD Voice”, and when that happens, having background noise washing over the foreground voice in a call won’t be acceptable. Time to start on a better solution methinks, and what better place to start than that wretched condenser mic!
Ben
I know not nothing about this. And the reason is that your sort likes the harp on how slim and sexy the handset is as a key selling point.
As I understand it (I do not actually DO this design work) a significant portion of the way sound is sorted out is the shape and size of the cavity between the little hole in the outer shell, and the actual microphone.
So, phones just a few years ago had tremendous sound quality. There was even a trend with flips to putting the mic nowhere near the speaker’s mouth, and using some other trickery to channel it over there with those fake flips, etc.
Then, smaller and smaller phones came out and there was simply no room for that stuff. If audio quality was a selling point (maybe just if everyone got to talk on the phone before buying it) you might see more demand for this, and handset design would change. As it is, it’s assumed to be okay, and is pretty low in aggregate wants by end users. I expect no change soon, though I am disappointed as well.