Why is telephone audio sampled at 8 kHz?

Telephones are optimized to transmit the human voice. The frequencies required for speech to be intelligible fall between 300 and 3400 Hz. Therefore, the sample rate of 8 kHz is used for narrowband voice-only communication.

1. Why is speech signal sampled at 8kHz?
2. What is the sampling rate for telephone system?
3. What does 8 kHz mean?
4. What is 8kHz audio?

Why is speech signal sampled at 8kHz?

A speech signal is sampled at 8 kHz and encoded into PCM format using 8 bits/sample. The PCM data is transmitted through a baseband channel via 4-level PAM.

What is the sampling rate for telephone system?

For most phonemes, almost all of the energy is contained in the 100 Hz – 4 kHz range, allowing a sampling rate of 8 kHz. This is the sampling rate used by nearly all telephony systems, which use the G. 711 sampling and quantization specifications.

What does 8 kHz mean?

The popular sampling rate for speech is 8 kHz—below audio CD quality at 44.1 kHz. This is because the human voice has a frequency range of approximately 0.3 to 3 kHz. With this example in mind, a higher kHz doesn't always mean better quality audio.

What is 8kHz audio?

An audio stream recorded in 8kHz, means there are 8000 points of audio captured in 1 second, while one recorded in 44.1kHz would have captured 44,100 points of audio in the same second.