a major Audio Quality Question

[Michael_Sigmavista]

Last Friday, I replaced a competitor's PBX at a customers site and switched to 3CX.
Everything went well—until we got to the topic of moh and mailbox announcements.

The customer made it clear to me that he would like Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5 as on-hold music.

It's in the public domain, so no big deal—just have the AI to speak the desired text, and you're good to go.

I put everything together in Tenacity, exported it to the target format, uploaded it to the PBX—cool.

Then the customer gave it a first check by phone:
His comment: “That sounds like crap.”

What am I supposed to say to the customer?

(i can totaly hear the quality loss after converting to 8k Hz Bit rate. i mean every customer notices that the announcements sound is terrible – some don't care, others do).

Are there any plans to improve this on the part of 3CX?
The problem was already there in v14.

Is FLAC support being considered?
Or any other format with higher quality?

 

[VoIPTools]

If you had asked me a couple of months ago, I would have said "it is not likely to change any time soon". But with all the changes 3CX has made recently (like stereo recordings), I have no idea what to expect.

What I can say is that I have not heard of any planned changes to the supported .wav file format we have been using for nearly 20 years. There are technical reasons why 3CX enforces this format rather than a higher "quality" format.

As a general rule, if you can create/get the original recording in the correct format from the start, that tends to sound better than taking a high quality recording and converting it to the required format. Using AI to generate text-to-speech is a good example where you can control the original format . But playing symphony style music is probably never going to sound good.

You need to reset your customer's expectations and choose something else for your on-hold music. You cannot change the limitations of the required .wav format.

 

[TheodorosG_3CX]

How was the file been converted?
Dis you used the 3CX Online Converter?

 

[MaxDaemon]

I'm gonna slightly necro this thread.

I've been having the same problem. I made the assumption that it was my end, that my audio quality going in was poor, but every step of the way the audio was good UNTIL I ran it through the 3CX audio conversion. At that point, the sound became muddy and distorted.
I've been using the converter for a couple years without issue, and this seems to have become a problem just recently. Has something changed?

Thanks!

 

[Kevin Attard Compagno]

Can you provide the exact format of the file BEFORE you converted it? If you started with a 22khz file (practically anything above 8khz, really), THAT is going to sound great.

But when you start with an audio stream that contains high frequencies, and that stream needs to be downsampled to 8khz, then it follows that the audio quality AFTER conversion will not be great.

The more high frequency sounds there are BEFORE conversion, the lower will be the percieved audio quality AFTER conversion.

Instead of orchestral or symphonic pieces, you would probably be better off with a Barry White track

 

[MaxDaemon]

Interestingly enough, the music sounds fine, and besides it's very low in the background. The problem I'm getting is that the announcement voice is very muddy and unclear. It almost sounds overblown, but I scaled back on the voice volume and re-exported it, then converted it, and it's no better.
Mostly what gets me is that this has worked fine for over a year, but seems to be suddenly degraded.

I'll fiddle with it some more. I was just surprised that it sounded poor 'this time'. I was just checking to see if anyone knew of any changes to the converter.

And yeah, the original is 44k I think. I can try it in Audacity and see if it fixes it.

Thanks!