What Does a Payphone Call Sound Like?

It’s interesting to compare the sound quality of a payphone call with that of the same voice captured with decent recording gear. All payphones have different sound quality, from clearly audible to nothing but static. This particular payphone’s landline sounds crackling and rugged, with strange noises of something like popcorn popping intruding at times.

I recorded myself talking into a payphone at Rockefeller Center last week, discovering in the process either that there had been a glitch with the phone a week earlier or that I was just wrong in my claim that the cost of making a local phone call on this phone had been jacked up by 1400%.

Payphone Call

Same Thing But Recorded With Decent Audio Gear

What most likely happened to make me think the cost of the call exploded is that I dialed a wrong number. I’ve been making a lot of calls from payphones lately and dialing a whole lot of numbers from memory, so me hitting a wrong number on this phone was entirely possible.

I doubt my assertion about the 1400% increase sent shockwaves through any quarters of New York (Get it? Quarters?) but it’s good to set the record straight. Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS) owns and maintains this phone, and in the past few months I’ve truly come to appreciate the existence and continued availability of their phones. PTS seems to have given up on some locations, such as the Times Square Grand Central subway stations. But the upstairs terminal at Grand Central and the Penn Station corridors have dozens of payphones, mostly working and sounding great. I also made a surprising discovery of several PTS phones and other devices at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, and will share photos and thoughts about that soon.

While making this call I unwittingly found myself being something I have not been for many years: A payphone hog. I had noticed from peripheral vision that a woman was standing nearby but I thought I saw her using a cell phone. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but it did not enter my thoughts that she might actually be waiting to use the payphone.

There is only one payphone left at Rockefeller Center, unless you count the one in the subway station, in which case there are two. I don’t include the subway phone since it is behind the subway turnstile and it would thus cost $2.75 in subway fare just to get to it.

It was not until I hung up the phone that I noticed the slightly impatient look of perturbment on the woman’s face. She hastily moved toward the phone and picked it up, her body language signaling to me that I’d taken up a bit of her time with my minutes-long chatter. If I’d noticed this I would have given up earlier on this payphone call.