Whither thou Sound Check?

Have you ever called a business—for example, a bank—and found yourself immediately bombarded with an incredibly loud phone tree designed so that in case you have hearing loss you can still hear it? Immediately, you move your thumb over to the volume keys and turn it down.

“Ahhh”, you exhale in relief, then sit for another five minutes listening to the most god-awful static-filled musak. Suddenly, the music stops. Has someone picked up the phone? You listen, but you don’t hear anything.

“Hello?”

You think you hear something. You thumb back over to the volume key and press it up. Finally, after increasing the volume as far as it will go—and a few awkward exchanges of “hello”—you are able to speak with the customer service representative.

Well, I’m starting to get pretty sick of it. Especially after last week, when I had to make a pretty excessive number of phone calls. It’s just annoying to have to constantly change the volume. And all those loud bursts of noise can damage your hearing over time.

Like many others, I’m planning on buying an iPhone this summer. That got me thinking: what mobile phones really need is Sound Check! Now obviously it’s a bit more complex, since it would need to be able to do normalisation on the phone call as it’s going on. This would probably cost a lot in system resources, but I’d be willing to bet that they could do some Quartz-style load balancing between the main CPU and the iPod’s DSP to mitigate that.

How great would that be, though? You go into the iPhone’s settings, press a button to enable Sound Check, then set the desired volume with the volume key. After that, the only time you’d ever need to adjust the volume would be to compensate for your environment. (e.g. turning it down when you’re in a quiet room or turning it up when you’re on a noisy sidewalk.)

Here’s to hoping Apple figures that one out for us!