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Hold music used to sound better. Here's why.

Tom Scott2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2018–2023
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explainer · general · evergreen · 2018–2023 on HN

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.

Audio & video engineeringInformation theory & signal processingHistory of computing#holdmusic#audiocompression#telephony#tomscott

3 comments from Hacker News

@colejohnson662023-07 · in “Computer memory prototype ditches 1s and 0s for denser data storage”

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

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@eliaspro2018-03 · in “Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?”

Relevant Tom Scott's "Things You Might Not Know"-Video: "Why Hold Music Sounds Worse Now" - ▶ this video

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@Svenskunganka2018-05 · in “Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone”

Doesn't most carriers heavily "compress" the sound, removing all sounds/frequencies that a human can't hear, etc? ▶ this video

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