voice modems

DRANK

If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming more complicated in general), but in older phones you would often find arrangements where the cellular modem had direct analog audio to the microphone and speaker, perhaps via some switching to share amplifiers. That design meant that the cellular modem functioned basically as a completely independent device, a fully-capable "cellular phone" with the ability to make and receive voice calls. The role of the rest of the smartphone, and its operating system, was just to provide control messages for starting and ending calls.In modern phones the audio path to and from the modem is digital and it's more integrated into the operating system audio service, but still not fully. You might have noticed, for example, that it is excessively difficult to record …