Tandem connections of wideband and narrowband speech communications systems: Part 1–narrowband-to-wideband link

The performance of a tandem connection of narrowband and wideband speech communication systems is evaluated. Specifically, the narrowband system consists of a conventional linear Predictive Coding (lpc) vocoder operating at a bit-rate of 2.4 kb/s and the wideband system consists of a Continuously Variable Slope Delta modulator cvsd operating at a bit rate of 16 kb/s. In Part 1 of this paper the properties of the narrowband-to-wideband link are investigated and in Part 2 the properties of the wideband-to-narrowband link are investigated. In part 1 the snr (signal-to-quantizing noise ratio) of the cvsd coder is analyzed over a 50-dB variation of the input signal levels and for a variety of source excitations for the lpc synthesizer. It is shown that snr improvements in the cvsd coder of 2 to 2.5 dB are possible in the slope overload region of the coder by modifying the source excitation of the lpc synthesizer and by preprocessing the input signal to the coder with an allpass filter. Both methods aid in reducing the peak factor (peak-to-rms level) of the input speech to the coder. Subjectively, however, only slight improvements in quality, if any, were observed with these modifications.