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

Tom Scott · 2.9M views · 2017-11-27 · 3:36

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN links it as the standard answer to why phone hold music sounds poor.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2023

Topics

Audio & video engineeringInformation theory & signal processingHistory of computing
Search by tags
hold musicaudio compressiontelephonytom scottphone exchanges

What people said

colejohnson66 · 2023-07 · Recommendation

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]: [VIDEO]

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eliaspro · 2018-03 · Recommendation

Relevant Tom Scott's "Things You Might Not Know"-Video: "Why Hold Music Sounds Worse Now" - [VIDEO]

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Svenskunganka · 2018-05 · Reference

Doesn't most carriers heavily "compress" the sound, removing all sounds/frequencies that a human can't hear, etc? [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Tom Scott, played through YouTube.

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