"Can you hear me now?" is not the standard for sound quality. Anyone who's been to a modern cinema, sat in a high-end home theater, or played a sophisticated game knows there is more. After all, they give two Academy Awards for sound because sound makes movies more vivid, immersive, persuasive, emotional, and believable. The same is true for sound's effect on video gameplay, especially with team play.

As we move into an era when video and post-video experiences become part of everyday communication, what should our audio expectations include?

Don Tuite wrote a thoughtful essay for electronic design," Audio Codecs — The Entertainment-DSP Connection : Standard compression algorithms and proprietary post-processing code challenge DSP chipmakers to deliver more MIPS at fewer watts."

Until now we've been comparing audio quality of Skype and other Internet telephony tools to old fashioned telephones and mobile phones. Tuite suggests a path from telecom codecs (the software that turns sound into digital form, and back) to the highest quality audio DSPs. These deliver more channels of sound, spatial arrangement of those sounds in three dimensions, and more fidelity that ears can hear.

What's between today's high-end telecom quality and tomorrow's high-end entertainment quality? Technical barriers include heat, electrical power, processing demands, and chip size. Most of the high-end entertainment codec systems are proprietary and expensive.

Do you want conversations, movies, music, television, vlogcasts, and everything else we get through Skype to be exceptional? Let's set the highest expectations.

See also:

• Wikipedia: Codec