Stereophonic speech teleconferencing

Speech intelligibility in monophonic loudspeaking telephones has been subject to some limitations from both the transmission medium and room acoustics. The medium has a limited bandwidth in addition to inherent noise and distortions. Room acoustics usually add the undesired impurities of the "rain-barrel effect", reverberance and background noise to direct speech signals. Binaural listening offsets many of these effects, enhancing speech intelligility. In this work, a stereophonic conference telephone has been designed and tested. The test results showed the feasibility of talker localization and improvements in talker identification. If two or more persons are talking simultaneously, the stereo telephone makes it possible to concentrate with less strain on one of the talkers. Speech intelligibility was found to be higher with the stereophonic telephone.