Audio Quality Increase

[Deviousfurball]

Firstly, allow me to apologise for this well trodden and often refused topic, but new information has come to light that makes me feel like this issue should be raised again.

Accurate at the time of this post, about seven hours ago, Discord unveiled 384Kbps audio quality. Obviously this is behind a paywall and is aimed at music listening, but I was wondering what the wizards at Teamspeak will do to answer. The link as evidence to my claim, is here https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en...rver-Boosting-


The following is some background information about me and my personal use-case, please disregard as you see fit.
Personally I use Teamspeak for its audio quality. I have some specialisation in audio and it allows me to easily tell what platform I am using simply by the quality of the audio of the people speaking. When I edit audio I generally work at studio levels far beyond the capability of most voice software not specifically designed to use the bandwidth. I choose Teamspeak because it is the best (bar none) in clarity outside of professional recording software like SourceConnect (which uses/used the Opus codec). While it is true that most people would need the ears of a canine to tell the difference between 96kbps and 320kbps for voice, it is quite possible to hear it in music.

While I'm not going to abandon my much loved personal Teamspeak server, I do not see the point of restricting bandwidth, especially when the default is already set at "2.71KiB/s" (level 6), and also must be customised manually to increase quality.
Also, my server is in need of an update because it is running version 3.4.0 and where my knowledge of Teamspeak is based, so this may have already been addressed in an update I have not done yet. If this is the case, please delete this thread.

I would truly love a slight boost in bitrate Perhaps a purchasable version of the server software with these limitations uncapped? Teamspeak Pro/Ultra/Plus perhaps?
While my knowledge of audio is reasonable, my knowledge of Teamspeak is best described as, pathetic, so please be a little kind in your responses

[Well_Skilled]

Look at this from the other hand. Discord is not prepared to handle that audio quality. Don't u think?

[Deviousfurball]

I honestly have no idea what they have prepared for in regards to this launch. I also appreciate that bitrate is only half of the story and their resolution/Hz is equally as important. Whether they have the infrastructure or ability to implement it remains to be seen.

Im a bit of a Teamspeak fan so I secretly hope it doesn't work

[Whittle]

Conversion link to save Googling in case like me you need help converting KiB/s (i.e. TeamSpeak channel settings) to Kbps.

It seems like a good idea - encourage people to subscribe for $99 per year (as they say Nitro Classic users would need to upgrade) and "boost" their favourite server as part of a community goal.

I personally can't imagine any immediate benefit for such high Kbps values unless you were playing music.

I would truly love a slight boost in bitrate Perhaps a purchasable version of the server software with these limitations uncapped? Teamspeak Pro/Ultra/Plus perhaps

The TeamSpeak license model is $ per slot and as bandwidth is a server owner concern, rather than a TeamSpeak issue, they don't have a reason to do a tiered approach based upon bandwidth. Presumably over the passage of time they'll adjust the channels so that the KiB/s can be increased.

Out of interest though, if they were unbounded, what would you be setting them to and why? Something high for music or are you having issues with voice at the moment once you have the quality at 7.71 KiB/s (i.e. Quality 10)?

[Screech]

OP, which do you think is greater, 11.87 KiB/s or 384Kbps?
11.87KiB/s is Opus Music at 10.

[plizze]

OP, which do you think is greater, 11.87 KiB/s or 384Kbps?
11.87KiB/s is Opus Music at 10.

You let it sound like 11,87kibs is more, but it equals 94,96kbps so its defenitly less.

However this is just the used bandwith which does not equal to quality since the used codec and compression also plays into that, but since discord and teamspeak both use opus, its pretts save to say that discord will provide better audio quality given the current status.

[Deviousfurball]

OP, which do you think is greater, 11.87 KiB/s or 384Kbps?
11.87KiB/s is Opus Music at 10.

To answer this question we need to make a few concessions. Firstly we need to ignore things like frequency and bit depth because bitrate is only half of the story. We also need to ignore the fact that "KiB/s" seems to be referring to a "kibibit", which is a binary data rate, which just confuses the matter even more. So to avoid confusion I will avoid short form and use only the long form of the words, kilobit and kilobyte. Also to simplify matters, I will ignore the extra 24 bits per second a kibibyte allows and refer to it as a kilobit to kilobyte conversion, which is much more familiar.
Now, with all that confusion out of the way.

11.87 kilobytes per second converts to 94 kilobits per second
48 kilobytes per second converts to 384 kilobits per second

For the sake of completion
There are 1.024 kilobytes in a Kibibyte so the calculations change a little.
11.87 KiB or kibibytes per second converts to 12.15488 kilobytes per second
12.15488 kilobytes per second converts to 97.23904 kilobits per second

11.87 KiB/s = 12.15488 KB/s = 97.23904 Kb/s. So, to finally answer your question, 384Kb is greater than 11.87 KiB.

[Scratch.]

Here's the thing that has always got me about teamspeak, they call it a bandwidth usage, not bitrate. So I have no idea if they are doing any compression beyond using the audio codec

Teamspeak recordings, which are now with multitrack support in the beta branch, still use a lossless Wav file, so I can't pull a sample or bitrate out of them. But I can still attempt a spectral analysis on them.

https://tenryuu.blob.core.windows.ne...on_CC_2019.png

This is a Opus Voice quality 10. Windows and MPC-HC report a bitrate of 768kbps from a sample of constant audio (removing muted segments) on a mono channel. Which is very very unlikely teamspeak using that as the audio, not even opus music will go higher than 510 (you could probably, but at that point you would just use a lossless codec)

it wouldn't be 10kpbs either, that sounds like this, https://people.xiph.org/~jm/opus/opu...ech_1.1_9.opus

There's a frequency shelf at 20kHz, which is a good estimate at the limit of human hearing capability (not lossless)

I'm not going to get much further without an expert, or a developer

[numma_cway]

To answer this question we need to make a few concessions. Firstly we need to ignore things like frequency and bit depth because bitrate is only half of the story. We also need to ignore the fact that "KiB/s" seems to be referring to a "kibibit", which is a binary data rate, which just confuses the matter even more. So to avoid confusion I will avoid short form and use only the long form of the words, kilobit and kilobyte. Also to simplify matters, I will ignore the extra 24 bits per second a kibibyte allows and refer to it as a kilobit to kilobyte conversion, which is much more familiar.
Now, with all that confusion out of the way.

11.87 kilobytes per second converts to 94 kilobits per second
48 kilobytes per second converts to 384 kilobits per second

For the sake of completion
There are 1.024 kilobytes in a Kibibyte so the calculations change a little.
11.87 KiB or kibibytes per second converts to 12.15488 kilobytes per second
12.15488 kilobytes per second converts to 97.23904 kilobits per second

11.87 KiB/s = 12.15488 KB/s = 97.23904 Kb/s. So, to finally answer your question, 384Kb is greater than 11.87 KiB.

That's including overhead. TeamSpeak bitrates always include an overhead of 45 B/p. In Opus channels, there's always 20 p/s, so 2250 B/s overhead is included in your number. Effective maximum bitrate is 9.9 kB/s.

We (team of TeamSpeak fan developers) once sent raw packets (to prevent loss through TeamSpeak's audio processing) and people where unable to tell 72 Kb/s and anything else apart.

[plizze]

We (team of TeamSpeak fan developers) once sent raw packets (to prevent loss through TeamSpeak's audio processing) and people where unable to tell 72 Kb/s and anything else apart.

What kind of content? Music? voice? Voice might be fine with 72kbs but music you can clearly tell a differents. 64,128,320 and 1200+ lossless are quite easy noticed

[numma_cway]

We used music.