Silly question: why are trains’ public announcement speaker systems so commonly garbled/crunchy/unintelligible? Is it that they work when installed, but they decay and aren’t maintained? Or is it a hard problem for some reason?
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didn’t once encounter this in european cities so i assume it’s bc our infra is shit
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Airport announcements tend to be pretty good, especially when pre-recorded. I assume it’s just bad speakers, maybe bad acoustics?
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Speakers probably, newer trains over here have great audio quality.
For live announcements, add microphone quality and/or noisy cab environment — those suck even in newer trains, e.g. conductors are often essentially speaking into a phone handset.
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For the stations I know there's a lot of acoustics work going on re. generally dealing with the big rooms and dynamically adjusting volume to noise levels etc., but I think it's doable. Again, for live announcements the microphones usually aren't exactly studio-quality 😅
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The sound quality is great, but the affectation of the voice…
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The requirements stated “speakers”. The lowest cost bidder installed the lowest cost speakers.
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I suspect it may be less decay and more that all transmitted audio quality used to be terrible so the speakers were "fine" by comparison.