Patent 8000609 was granted and assigned to British Telecommunications Public Limited Company on August, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present invention relates to the communication or reproduction of sound, in particular audible sound. There is provided a method of communicating a sound, including the steps of: transmitting, onto an optical link, pairs of signal copies, the signal copies of a given pair having a time offset relative to one another; applying the audible sound to the optical link, such that the audible sound causes a phase modulation to the transmitted signal copies; receiving modulated signal copies previously transmitted onto the link; and, for received pairs of signal copies, causing one signal copy of a pair to mix with the other signal copy of that pair so as to produce a signal representative of the sound. The sound is an audible sound. It has been found that a delay of at least 75 micro seconds allows for a better reproduction of audio sounds, since these have a relatively low frequency content.