[Asterisk-Users] Audio format for announcements

[Sean Adams]

Hi guys. First off, to the folks at Digium: outstanding work. The fact 
that Asterisk is open source puts you right at the cusp of what will be 
the most important telecom advance since the transatlantic cable.

Anyway... a couple newbie questions concerning sound quality - I don't 
see any reason why the system should not use the best possible format 
for any given connection.

1) Is it possible to store the menu sounds in wav/aiff, and let 
asterisk compress them to gsm only as necessary? Eg for POTS lines, yes 
the lines are crap already, but why butcher the sound any further by 
running it through a speech codec?

2) For my internal SIP phones, I don't care about bandwidth usage. What 
settings will give the best sound quality?  Does the protocol (or for 
that matter, any particular brand of phones) support uncompressed or 
very high bit rate audio for intra-pbx calls?

Thanks,
Sean