HD Voice Coming To Clear Up Your Calls?

We have phones that can buy plane tickets, play video games from the early 2000s, rock out to music, and blast data across networks at incredible speed, but still can’t get a call to you with anything resembling decent audio clarity. Well, thanks to Ericsson, that’s about to change.

Ericsson has been working on a new codec, which as we all know stands for “code/decode”. Codecs are the algorithms that compress video and audio, and the codec for phone audio has been essentially unchanged since mobile phones really became popular, because phones always sound like crap anyway.

HD voice technology, as it’s called by the idiots in the marketing department who don’t understand that “definition” refers to visual images, has been on GSM networks (that is, pretty much everywhere but the US) for a while, but not on CDMA networks. Ericsson just cracked that with their Enhanced Variable Rate Codec Narrowband-Wideband, which we’re just going to call Evan. Evan can deliver sounds ranging from 50 Hz to 7000 Hz, a much broader range of human hearing than the current 300 Hz to 3400 Hz.

It’s still being worked on in the lab, but high-fidelity calling is just a few short years away. Soon we’ll be able to hear everything the other person is doing! That’s…great?