My wife and I were discussing how our efforts to improve at French
are hampered by the crappy quality of cellular voice calls. We don't
notice it when calls in English are of bad quality, my guess is our
brains interpolate and fill in any missing words for us - but in
French, the poor quality is obvious and makes it impossible to
understand the full meaning of what someone is saying. Voicemails
seem to be particularly bad. We listened to one left in French
yesterday from our local bike shop where every other word was
unintelligible, as if the guy had a mouthful of marbles. My
suspicion is that the cell carriers are double-compressing the audio
- once as normal during the original call and once again when the
voice message is stored. When you play it back it gets compressed
yet again. It's worse that we're both old enough to remember when
phone call quality did not suck. It all makes me want to go back to
a landline and tape-based answering machine.