comment: >
  
  A person watching TV will hear the actors before the studio audience will
context: This is a friendly reminder to read our rules.
  Remember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not "thoughts had in the shower!"
  (For an explanation of what a "showerthought" is, please read this page.)
  Rule-breaking posts may result in bans. >
  
  I learned this one day when my friend and I were on the phone but within yelling distance apart from each other. He yelled “Over here!” which I heard through the phone first. I was 10 and it blew my mind. >
  
  Although it moves slower than sound if you're close. 
  A friend and I were in cars next to each other and talking on the phone. I could see her mouth moving before hearing it over the phone >
  
  That’s perceiving light, not sound, man >
  
  They were next to each other so even sound would be faster if there wasn't glass between them. >
  
  Are you saying that unobstructed, sound would be faster than light? >
  
  No. I'm saying that unobstructed, sound would be faster than a phone call when you're 8 feet apart.
  phone call < sound < light, when you're 8 feet apart.
  sound < phone call < light, when you're much further apart. >
  
  You and the other caller are 8 feet apart, but your call is traveling to a cell phone tower, then to a switch, then to a cell phone tower, then back to the person you called (at the bare minimum). While you and the person you called may be 8 feet apart, the call travelled quite a long distance to get there. Since your voice and the call arrive at very close intervals, the call had to travel much faster than sound to get to the person you called as quickly as it did. >
  
  Yes, that is how phones work. But the net distance travelled is still 8 feet, so the net speed is slower. That's what we're talking about. >
  
  There’s a race between two cars. Car A starts 100miles from the end and drives the 100mph. Car B starts 1 miles away and drives 1 mph. They arrive at the same time but who moved faster? There’s no concept of net speed. There’s latency and lag within a system. >
  
  Yes, electrical signals / radio waves travel faster than sound. No one is saying otherwise.
  This is the same level of pedanticness as people replying to OP with "um, actually, telephone's don't make sound travel faster than the speed of sound, they convert the sound into a signal that travels as electricity / radio and then is converted back to sound on the other end." Like yeah, that is how phones work. That's not the point.
  OP was noting how phones transmit sound (as in the information itself) faster than the speed of sound. That is, if sound traveled from one phone to another through air, it would be slower than using the phone. And then a commenter noted how, if you're close enough, it's actually not faster to use the phone than sound going through the air between you. That is a concept of net speed. >
  
  Makes sound travel at the speed of electricity and radio waves >
  
  My ISP makes electricity travel at the speed of sound. >
  
  If we’re lucky >
  
  Also slower, depending on location and telephone service type >
  
  yeah true actually >
  
  Yes. Look into the Big Ben radio phenomenon. Where you can hear the clock tower sound on the radio before you hear it in real life. >
  
  We’re really stretching the definition of phenomenon nowadays >
  
  Are we really?
  
  a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question.
  "glaciers are unique and interesting natural phenomena" >
  
  Yes I guess I was wrong. Telephones definitely fit this definition >
  
  Voice to phone receiver. Analog sound waves then get turned into electrical pulses. Sent at the speed of electricity to another location using metal wires. Reverse the process on the other end. Fascinating. >
  
  It truly is fascinating. >
  
  Even when I read about it in great detail, it still sounds like magic. >
  
  If it still moved at the speed of sound it would be very annoying to talk to someone in a different country. >
  
  Just a reminder, the first successful telephone call was Alexander Graham Bell screaming "AHH FUCK!!! I SPILLED BATTERY ACID ON MY LEG!!!". >
  
  
  "Paraphrased" >
  
  Reposts are faster than the speed of documentation >
  
  It's like saying email can make regular mail travel faster,
  It stops being sound once it's turned into data, when the data sent by the original phone is received by the other phone it's not the same "sound" it's only the same data. Otherwise it would be called a physic bending device not a data sending one. >
  
  I still marvel at how it can reproduce out of that electrical pulse the same timber or quality of sound. An instrument needs a very specific shape to produce the sound but the tiny speaker can make it again without that specific shape. 😱 >
  
  It uses the same specific shape. Just not as large. >
  
  Not really, no. An instrument has a specific shape to cause things to resonate and vibrate in a certain way to produce a certain sound wave in the end going out in the air. A speaker just uses a flat sheet and reproduces the final sound wave, without doing any of that resonance stuff. >
  
  The sound doesn't travel, it is converted to electrical signals which travel the distance and get converted back to sound. >
  
  And because of the conversion process, it is not the original sound that was transmitted.  The sound is quite literally reproduced. >
  
  I remember in high school physics class we had a test question about a radio DJ interviewing in a guest in the studio. 
  Multiply by pi, carry the one, and sure enough, it turns out that a person listening on their car radio 100 miles away would hear the DJ's voice a fraction of a second before the guest sitting 8 feet across the room would. >
  
  For me, the internet is more impressive. Once I was in a Zoom class and there was a thunderstorm outside. I saw a lightning strike near where my teacher lived and heard it through the zoom call way before the sound reached me IRL. 
  Still so weird to realize how the same sound wave that hit the teacher's microphone, reached me through tons of compressions and travels to Zoom servers and back, at the same time that real sound traveled like... 600m? >
  
  I saw a thing once pointing out how a person at home next to a radio could actually hear a live concert before people far enough away in the audience because the sound could go from the microphone through radio waves out a speaker faster than it could reach the far back audience. >
  
  This is technically false but also true if you don’t think about it too hard. >
  
  Technically it isn’t sound that is traveling, it is Information. In this case, the information on how to reproduce the sounds to the other phone equipment. The information can be converted to electrical signals, light signals, microwaves or radio waves… or some combination of all of them, but in the end the information is used to reproduce the sound. >
  
  Yes no shit >
  
  Technically, the sound isn't travelling from their phone to yours, just the data. Then their phone recreates the sound from that data >
  
  Sound is turned into electricity which then travels at the speed of electricity and is then turned back into sound. >
  
  I’m no expert by any means so if I’m wrong please correct me but to my knowledge it travels at just under the speed of light and varies slightly depending on the resistances of the wires the signal is transmitted through. >
  
  Wait… is it almost as fast as light? I know that in a single second light can travel around the would like 7 times. So, if given that both phones had perfects connection, how much slower would they be than light? >
  
  Most of the delay nowadays is thanks to cell phones and telephone networks being digitized. A computer samples the audio, turns it into an encoded message, transmits that encoded message over wire, or radio, or whatever, and then another computer decodes the message and reproduces it. You may end up with several milliseconds of latency in this way.
  A "conventional" POTS (plain old telephone service) switchboard is effectively wiring the two phones together, and there is no encoding process, there is no computer. This information travels at the speed of light in copper, which is roughly 2/3rds the speed of light in a vacuum - effectively instantaneous as far as a human brain is concerned. >
  
  It travels at the speed of electricity in copper, not the speed of light in copper, right? >
  
  Yep, proven in a drunken night out when my friends and I split up around 3am, and we called each other and were screaming down the phone so we could hear each other on the phone then the real sound a second or two later...