<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.5730.11" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV>>12kHz isn't really enough for high quality voice, and the extra bit
<BR>>rate needed to push the bandwidth to 15kHz is small. Also, a deep man's
<BR>>voice looses something when you cut off at 70Hz. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I'm not sure that this isn't stretching things a
bit. There are no handsets or headsets (AFAIK) that can do justice to 50
KHz and probably most speakers attached to a PC can't. Likewise, while a
deep male voice can go below 70 Hz, few transducers can do justice to those
frequencies, either. I don't think the attempt is to reproduce a
symphony. The extra bandwidth (even if it is minor) would be hard to
justify if one needed $500 speakers to benefit from it. While a number of
people might be able to tell the difference in an A B comparison, I suspect few
would notice it without direct comparison. I also suspect Skype is correct
in that the majority of people, listening to it on typical hardware would like
additional low frequencies less than without because of things like distortion
in the transducer. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Getting the bandwidth above 3 KHz at the top will
improve intelligibility, but somewhere between 5 and 10 KHz that reaches a point
of diminishing returns. Likewise, extending the low end below 300 Hz will
help naturalness, but that also reaches diminishing returns somewhere around 100
Hz unless all the pieces are very high quality (from the mic to the
speaker). It seems to me that they have exceeded those realities by a
comfortable margin, which is generally what good engineering is all
about.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Wilton</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>