Reminds me of something that happened to me.

Some amount of hissy background noise, you see, is unavoidable for analogue audio links. Analogue broadcast radio, landline phones, pre-digital mobile phones. But digital systems don’t work like that. They pretty much work perfectly, or not at all. There may still be background noise because microphones pick up environmental sounds from traffic or weather or the users’ heavy breathing or what-have-you, and mobile phones can have drop-outs in the signal when one or both handsets in a call just can’t hear a cell base-station, but nothing in the transmission system creates its own hiss.

Yep, a little tiny bit of background hiss is artificially inserted into 99%+ of phone systems today so that people realize they are still working (and they are used to hearing it).

A few years ago, we put in a new VOIP phone system at work. Since bandwidth on the network was plentiful, I changed the codec to be much better and to produce much higher quality calls. I basically took the quality from standard analog phone quality (bad) to a decent-quality MP3.

Oh, the complaints were epic.

It didn’t “sound natural” or it sounded “too natural” (yeah, I know – contradictory). It “made voices sound weird.” And more.

Note that there no technical problems at all. It worked perfectly. People were just not used to hearing very high-quality voice over the phone.

I had to change it back in less than four hours. People couldn’t take it.

I learned that people mostly actually prefer very low-quality audio over the phone, at least with colleagues and acquaintances. My guess is that because it feels less intimate.