Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

One thing has always struck me as strange in the airline business. Why has no one fixed the "aural experience" of flying.

My understanding is that airlines have a big problem in trying to differentiate themselves from their competition. They are basically flying the same planes with the same seats at the same speed to the same airports with the same terrible security etc. Surely they would be doing all they can with the things they can change. So why such terrible sound design?

There are a bunch of aspects associated with this that need addressing (perhaps in another post one day) but the most obvious problem to me is the speaker system the crew use to talk to the passengers.

I could imagine Ryanair using some sort of megaphone and being proud of how upsetting it was, but I recently flew BA and the speaker system the crew used to talk to the passengers was awful. Every communication was a loud, crackly, explosion of sound. I could see the passengers literally wincing from the noise.

How hard could it be to put a few high-end microphones through some decent speakers? Am I missing something here?