<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>NASA is also trying to get down TONS of data and have a forward command link. Audio only gets part of the bandwidth. it is good quality, just limited.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />Or to put it another way, the quality does the job perfectly well, so there is no need to spend money or bandwidth improving it. The additions I've seen (as an outsider) have revolved mainly around imaging improvements, and I think that's more important.<br /><br />I think it also may be a little unfair to compare the audio quality to a lot of terrestrial communications systems such as cell phones, because it's really trying to do a different job. There's probably a great deal more background noise for the microphones to cope with than we armchair astronauts realize. I suspect that because the quality sounds an awful lot like aviation headsets, which are designed to pick up a voice coherently in a very noisy environment. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>