I certainly welcome the recent push for HD Voice, especially as GIPS has been providing HD Voice for almost 10 years now. Many has now used HD Voice in applications such as Skype, and more usage is needed to establish this new quality level in a wider market.

The HD voice discussion has led to surfacing of an old issue, namely the focus on the codec. Tsahi writes in his blog that the codec is the main obstacle to HD voice. However, he points out that HD voice is much more than the codec, which I can’t emphasize enough.

HD voice is all about high quality which puts even tougher requirements on everything else like noise suppression, echo cancellation, gain control, etc.  In fact, once you have solved all those problems the codec becomes important and will be the limiting factor for the quality given everything else is taken care of perfectly. The important thing to understand is that the codec is just one small piece of the quality experience.

Of course, there are nuances also since the robustness of the codec to things like packet loss is important.

INTEROPERABILITY is one very important factor with the codec that probably is why it is so prominent in all discussions. I do think we will have to live with a multitude of codecs though. A few years ago, I thought we had more than enough codecs, but apparently not since they keep coming …

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