• Re: Telco (voice) channel

    From Don Y@blockedofcourse@foo.invalid to sci.electronics.design on Sat Jun 6 12:36:33 2026
    From Newsgroup: sci.electronics.design

    On 6/6/2026 7:55 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
    On 05/06/2026 21:27, Don Y wrote:
    In the POTS days, one could model a telephone channel as
    roughly 3KHz BW (~300-3KHz) with the copper crapping out
    at about 4KHz.

    Digitizing to 8b at 8KHz and you were pretty much golden.

    With cellular and the fact that legacy plant is still
    in place (i.e., you have no real control over how the
    signal is routed -- from second to second), is there
    a better model?

    Or, a technique to guesstimate the characteristics of
    the "current" channel, dynamically?

    You may be able to infer a rough idea of the channel frequency response by taking an FFT of a chunk digitised at 44kHz. But I'd be more inclined to low pass filter everything above 4kHz and use 8b @ 8kHz.

    It should be good enough for the intended purpose of speech at that.

    I typically am dealing with speech that is conveyed in open air
    or via a relatively high bandwidth channel. I continually update my
    models based on my knowledge of the speaker's identity AND THE
    "unimposing" CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CHANNEL.

    But, also have to handle the likely possibility of a telecom channel
    for the same speaker.

    This both distorts their perceived speech AND would bias the
    model that has been built without those constraints.

    If all you are doing is *recognition*, its not a problem. But,
    for diarization and identification, it lowers their effectiveness.
    Lack of sidetone and the latency of modern telco already leaves
    you with a significant challenge!

    As an "inverse filter" can't reconstruct characteristics that have
    been discarded by a lower sampling frequency, I have two choices:
    - run the trained models through an appropriate filter that
    models the telco channel
    - build a separate model for *just* the telco channel

    But, if that channel can change from call to call... <shrug>

    I *might* be able to use PRESUMED knowledge of the party's identity
    to help characterize the current channel. But, that would defeat identification.

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