Hold music used to sound better. Here's why.
Tom Scott2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2018-2023
2.9M views · 8 years ago · explainer · evergreen
Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.
HN links it as the standard answer to why phone hold music sounds poor.
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3 comments from Hacker News
There's a legitimate reason for that. Tom Scott did a video on it.[0] It basically boils down to telephone switches starting to compress the audio. Compress and decompress multiple times (by various companies) on the way to you, and the quality degrades very quick. [0]: ▶ this video
Doesn't most carriers heavily "compress" the sound, removing all sounds/frequencies that a human can't hear, etc? ▶ this video
Relevant Tom Scott's "Things You Might Not Know"-Video: "Why Hold Music Sounds Worse Now" - ▶ this video