To anybody listening to Thom Hartmann's Norwegian guest.

[Jeebo]

The show just ended, and I kept noticing something very odd. There was an echo reverberating along with his words, but the odd thing is that the echo somehow was PRECEDING his words, rather than following them. I was hearing the echo, then hearing his words perhaps a quarter-second later. I'm trying to figure out how that was happening. There are lots of really smart people here on Democratic Underground. A sound engineer might be able to explain this curious phenomenon.

-- Ron

[Earthshine2]

1. Isn't is amazing that internet teleconferences allow us to talk and listen at the same time?

It takes a lot of processing to filter out the send vs. the receive to minimize the amount of your own sound that you would otherwise hear. (That's called feedback.)

Lots of digital processing goes on during these conversations, comparing the signal one moment to the next.

Many artifacts (misplaced sounds) such as echoes are created during this processing.

It's an inherently imperfect process. I'm amazed it works as well as it does.