Higher pitched voices are hard to hear with simultaneous audio.

I've been noticing issue in our discord voice chat for a little while now, and have recently discovered a way to replicate the issue. The effect is that people with higher pitched voices are having trouble being heard in the server.

The issue comes in when there is at least one other source of sound in the server - especially if that sound is lower pitched. I am able to replicate this by having three people in a server - one person with a high pitched voice, one person with a low pitched voice, and one person listening. When the person with the lower pitched voice speaks, the person with the higher pitched voice cuts out as if they had bad cell reception. When they are audible, it's just the low tones of their voice that get picked up.

It's not that their voices are being drowned out by other, louder noises - it audibly cuts in and out. This especially causes problems when using audio bots like Rythm to play music. We've recently had to abandon those bots because several of the people in our server were having too much issue being heard with the bot playing music - even if the bot was turned down/muted to the listeners.

I've done a bit of audio work myself - so I'm going to explain what I believe is happening. It's entirely possible I'm way off. If that's the case, forgive me. To me, it sounds like the way Discord compresses audio is by reducing the number of pitches being sent, but dynamically changing the range of pitches available. That way, the audio stream sounds as if it were high bitrate by truncating the high and/or low pitches. So if someone with a high pitched voice is talking, it only sends the high pitches, and vice-versa. The issue I'm experiencing is happening because the app is prioritizing the lower pitches. The compression sends the low pitches through crystal clear, but the higher pitched voices get lost along the way.

Thank you!