Echo Suppressor - Limitations

Limitations

While effective, this approach leads to several problems:

• Double-talk: It is fairly normal in conversation for both parties to speak at the same time, at least briefly. Because each echo suppressor will then detect voice energy coming from the far-end of the circuit, the effect would ordinarily be for loss to be inserted in both directions at once, effectively blocking both parties. To prevent this, echo suppressors can be set to detect voice activity from the near-end speaker and to fail to insert loss (or insert a smaller loss) when both the near-end speaker and far-end speaker are talking. This, of course, temporarily defeats the primary effect of having an echo suppressor at all.

• Clipping: Since the echo suppressor is alternately inserting and removing loss, there is frequently a small delay when a new speaker begins talking that results in clipping the first syllable from that speaker's speech.

• Dead-set: If the far-end party on a call is in a noisy environment, the near-end speaker will hear that background noise while the far-end speaker is talking, but the echo suppressor will suppress this background noise when the near-end speaker starts talking. The sudden absence of the background noise gives the near-end user the impression that the line has gone dead.

Echo suppressors cause effects that are frustrating for both parties to a call, although they do effectively deal with the echo. In response to this, AT&T Bell Labs developed echo canceler theory in the early 1960s, which then resulted in laboratory echo cancelers in the late 1960s and commercial echo cancelers in the 1970s.