This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Radio Voice: From YKTTW
Fanra: "This occurs even on shows where the builders of the communications devices in question achieved faster-than-light space travel hundreds of years ago and who by all rights ought to have come up with a perfect-fidelity microphone/speaker system long ago."
Right, I said when it was still a YKTTW that, no matter how advanced your technology, perfect fidelity takes up more bandwidth than clipping off frequencies that you don't need. When you are designing your future space phone are you more interested in reaching the ship in orbit with a smaller than a deck of playing cards device while underground surrounded by metal without having the battery run out or do you want to give some of that up so it sounds perfect?
This is a trope but it is stupid to "blame" Star Trek and other shows for this. Have you ever seen a Star Trek communicator have its battery go dead? No. And you know why? Because they decided to not take up battery space with extra tech to make voices sound perfect when you don't need them to.
Adam850: I'd expect that with all of the other futuristic technology in these shows, you can have a communicator that has good fidelity, without sacrificing other features. Besides, with digital communications, you don't need as much bandwidth, and you can encode whatever frequency range you want.
Computer Sherpa: What Adam850 said. As I argued in the YKTTW, when you have devices that can transmit an entire person in under 10 seconds from one location to another at quantum resolution--an amount of data that, if stored, would occupy the better part of a capital ship's entire computer core-- (and, as of Star Trek: Nemesis, you can miniaturize that device to make it smaller than a communicator), the difference between radio-quality bandwidth and CD-quality bandwidth is like the difference between one and two grains of rice in an empty silo. I'm quite certain that if they wanted to, the Federation could easily design perfect-fidelity communicators, but that would confuse the viewers. Thus, we have this trope.
Adam850: Removed: "(the effect is called "flanged" in the business)". It's not flanging.
