Most people I ring (VOIP) tell me they hear an echo of their voice.

k123456

I use VOIPBuster to call landlines from my PC. Most people I ring tell me they hear an echo of their voice. I am using a Mike and Speakers - would a headset or usb phone fix this problem.

Thanks

cgarvey

Most likely, yeah. An echo can be caused by poor VoIP setup, or broadband connection, but in the first instance your problem is most likely to be your speaker/mic setup.

You could try an ordinary pair of headphones in your sound card, to make sure that is the problem, as this would prevent their incoming voice being picked up by the mic and being sent back to them (echo). You could try turning down your speakers and/or moving the mic as far away as possible from them. A headset (or USB phone) will give a much better quality (because of the local mic, and little or no echo).

.cg

Blaster99

You should certainly use a headset, but many people get echo with VoIP. I guess it's because of latency and/or the VoIP provider not using particularly good echo cancelling gear. Normally it goes away during the conversation as the echo cancelling algorithm trains in on the echo and removes it.

Solair

Couple of suggestions to improve sound quality:

1) Make sure that your mic and speaker levels arn't too loud as if you're using poor quality handsets you might get some echo. They shouldn't be any louder than you'd hear on a normal eircom handset.

2) Make sure that you use the G.711a codec rather than the u codec.
a = aLaw (European telephone system codec)
u = uLaw (North American telephone system)

aLaw produces noticibly better sound quality than its north american cousin and your calls will sound much more like what you'd normally hear over an eircom line.

uLaw tends to produce a more harshly digitised line that only sounds OK if used with a strong north american accent.

Technical explanation below:

G.711 is a high bit rate (64 Kbps) ITU standard codec. It is the native language of the modern digital telephone network.

Although formally standardised in 1988, the G.711 PCM codec is the granddaddy of digital telephony. Invented by Bell Systems and introduced in the early 70's, the T1 digital trunk employed an 8-bit uncompressed Pulse Code Modulation encoding scheme with a sample rate of 8000 samples per second. This allowed for a (theoretical) maximum voice bandwith of 4000 Hz. A T1 trunk carries 24 digital PCM channels multiplexed together. The improved European E1 standard carries 30 channels.

There are two versions: A-law and U-law. U-law is indigenous to the T1 standard used in North America and Japan. The A-law is indigenous to the E1 standard used in the rest of the world. The difference is in the method the analog signal being sampled. In both schemes, the signal is not sampled linearly, but in a logarithmic fashion. A-law provides more dynamic range as opposed to U-law. The result is a less 'fuzzy' sound as sampling artifacts are better supressed.

Using G.711 for VoIP will give the best voice quality; since it uses no compression and it is the same codec used by the PSTN network and ISDN lines, it sound just like using a regular or ISDN phone. It also has the lowest latency (lag) because there is no need for compression, which costs processing power. The downside is that it takes more bandwidth then other codecs, up to 84 Kbps including all TCP/IP overhead. However, with increasing broadband bandwith, this should not be a problem.

G.711 is supported by most VoIP providers.

parsi

Solair wrote:

uLaw tends to produce a more harshly digitised line that only sounds OK if used with a strong north american accent.

Has to be quote of the day

crosstownk

I plug my headphones into my laptop and the echo disappears. With a laptop the proximity of the speakers to the microphone can cause 'echo' to the person you are talking to.

TempestSabre

I'm on blueface and get a n echo, primarily when people ring me. When I ring them back it seems ok most of the time.

Freddie59

k123456 wrote:

I use VOIPBuster to call landlines from my PC. Most people I ring tell me they hear an echo of their voice. I am using a Mike and Speakers - would a headset or usb phone fix this problem.

Thanks

I know you're not calling handset to handset, but I just found this on the Internet. Interesting.:)


http://microtronix.ca/echo_problems.htm