[Freeswitch-users] Looking for some good/cheap desktop phones

[Frank Carmickle]

On Sat, Feb 06, Christian Jensen wrote:
> The response on this thread has been great!
> 
> I wonder if there should be a link off the FreeSwitch site for vendors for
> these phones.... hint hint.
> 
> >From what I have been hearing here and elsewhere, the preference is Polycom,
> Cisco, Grandstream, Aastra in that order.

Hmmm...  That's not the impression that I got at all.  From what I picked up on this thread it would look more like

polycom snom aastra cisco grandstream

I'm sure others can speak to how Cisco doesn't do presence right.  They are harder to provision then Snoms and Polycoms and in my opinion don't sound as good either.  To me they sound dull and fuzzy on transmit.  I've heard about four different versions of 7940/7960.  

The Snom 3x0 series have suffered in the speaker phone department until version 7 firmware.  Version 8 betas have sounded even better yet.  Make sure that if your going to be using headsets with Snoms that you ground the phone to something.  This can be done by either having a shielded network cable attached to a grounded switch or computer, or order them with the grounded power adaptor.  They give you the not so grounded adaptor by default.  Finding shielded ethernet can be kind of tricky but it is nice to have.

Polycom speech quality is my favorite if you can handle the ringy under water sounds of the background noise especially on speaker.  It sounds like there's a fish tank running near by if there's any white noise.  I believe this to be the case because the way they split the audio up in to many bands to process it.  Maybe less steep filters would help.  

It's hard to believe how many people just don't care about call quality.  It starts with a good sounding phone that doesn't echo or hum.  I'd like to hope that we are doing our part to help the world sound a little better all the time.

--FC