Today, on Major Nelson’s blog, Microsoft showed off the Xbox One’s new voice chat. But voice chat is voice chat, right? What could be different. Well, the quality for one. Listened to side by side, the difference is stark…
First listen to the quality of what we currently have on the Xbox 360…
Now listen to the quality on Xbox One:
Regardless of your cynicism about the console, that’s a pretty clear difference. Apparently the increase in quality has a lot to do with Skype.
“Thanks to integration with Skype’s audio codec,” says the blog, “which has a proven track record of high-quality voice through billions of hours of use within Skype, as well as dedicated audio processing (for Xbox One conversations via Skype and multiplayer party chats), Xbox One offers higher quality voice chat with the Xbox One Chat Headset compared to Xbox 360—whether you’re chatting in-game or through party chat with Skype on Xbox One.
“But the improvements don’t stop there. The Xbox One Wireless Controller’s new expansion port dramatically expands the data transfer rate between the controller and console. Combined with Skype’s audio codec, this enables crystal-clear digital audio with the Xbox One Chat Headset, both capturing and rendering speech at 24 KHz PCM, which is triple the rendering sample rate and a 50 percent capture rate improvement over Xbox 360 headsets. And, as we shared before, the Xbox One Chat Headset comes with every Xbox One console.”
What are your thoughts — is the quality of voice chat important to you? I think it’s great that voice chat has improved, but I’m not sure if it’ll make a difference to my overall experience. Regardless, it’s a cool upgrade.
Comments
14 responses to “Hear The Difference In Voice Chat Between The Xbox One And The Xbox 360”
If only they could improve the quality of what people said over it as easily as they can improve the quality of how it sounds… 😛
I dunno, I always saw the low pre-order numbers as hope that most of the xbox live dickheads would be moving across to PS4.
Was a major reason I was considering XBone.
I don’t know about that… the fact that COD: Ghosts pre-orders on XBone are just about on a par with PS4 despite the actual console pre-orders barely being half those of PS4 suggests to me that the COD crowd (which is pretty much the worst crowd) aren’t going anywhere 😛
cant you just mute them or set to friends only
I’m forever hopeful!
Oh god I never thought of that! DAMN YOU MICROSOFTTTTTTTTT!!!
But this will remove all those silly misunderstandings, instead of hearing people scream “I’LL TEABAG YOUR CORPSE!”, it’ll turn out that they were politely saying “It’s tea time, of course”
This is something I think will only be appreciated – fully – after people start using voice on Xbox One on a regular basis. There’s no denying it – the quality difference is very noticeable, and sounds perfect.
I’ve been noticing this for the last year just from jumping between XBL chat and Steam chat (on PC). I don’t think they’d updated the console’s audio codecs since launch and you can really tell the difference. This just brings the console back to current quality levels.
Actually they increased the bandwidth in the codec last year – but it’s still no where near as good as above – or with what you get on steam. XBone is going to be sooo much better for voice.
Xbox ONE Voice Chat! Not available to Australia until 2015 due to the language barrier.
cool, the quality’s as clear as the inbuilt vita microphone! but it’s moot, i’d probably keep the chat turned off, u know.. kids 🙁
The vita microphone really is surprisingly good. I find my Vita is better for Skype than my iPad.
I was under the impression they purposefully nerfed the 360’s voice chat quality to keep the size to a minimum to help it always arrive on time… does the new codec deliver better quality for the same bandwidth or did they just increase how much of your net it requires?