On Mon, 2007-03-12 at 10:37 +0100, Theo Band wrote:
Theo Band wrote:
John R Pierce wrote:
Leonardo Vilela Pinheiro wrote:
On 3/10/07, *Theo Band* wrote:
I try to find a softphone that works with Asterisk and Centos44,does anyone has a good suggestion or is it better to buy a hardphone?
AFAIK, microphone bad quality is more related to the hardware, not the software. My onboard "Intel high definition" sound chipset (ICH7 compatible - Intel 945GNT) has a bad output sound, but a much worse input (microphone). I have tried using Windows XP, CentOS, Ubuntu, many softphones (Skype, X-Lite, Ekiga, Twinkle) and definitely the problem is hardware (or all drivers are broken).
the output quality of the Intel branded motherboards I've used has been quite good. Microphone inputs somewhat less so, but still plenty good enough for telephony IF your microphone has high enough gain. If someone is recording high fidelity (music, etc) from microphones, I recommend they get an external microphone preamp and use the line input on their sound card, or even better a USB input/output box.
for voice/telephony, USB headsets are the way to go.
I also have one trust USB headset and it works, except the volume cannot be adjusted, it's always max (and that's not nice for a headset...). I have 20 desktops running FC4/Centos44 on AMD based Motherboards. The sound is onboard using a Nvidia chipset. Using skype and esd/arts the sound is very good, no problem. As soon as I try any of the softphones the mic is heavily distorted. I can even hear a hum as if the ground shielding is not properly connected. Since skype works so nice (using eithers OSS or alsa) I expect this to be a software based problem not hardware. And one softphone is working with FC4 (slfphone) but not on Centos4.4. The mic sound is less compared to skype (there is a hiss, when pronouncing the letter 's' the sound is distorted) but upto now that's the only one that is acceptable for only FC4, not Centos :-(
Well I tried Twinkle and it works, but on a scale from 0 to 10 I give the sound a 5 were I can give the Skype sound quality a 9+. Strange that it seems to be so difficult to get good sound quality on Centos/FC. My motherboards are A8N32-SLI Deluxe and Foxconn NF4UK8AA-8EKRS both equipped with onboard Realtek ALC 850. Has anyone experience (good or bad) with the Realtek ALC 850?
Comparing Skype & Twinkle sound quality is not really fair. The reason is that Skype uses 16k samples while SIP clients like Twinkle use the very common 8k samples. Skype will always sound better than standard SIP clients or POTS. The only VoIP solution I know off that has similar sound capabilities is Polycom's latest VoIP phone the IP650. Your VoIP PBX will need to support this too off course or else it will fall back to the plain old sound.
Regards, Patrick