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

Tom Scott2 HN recommenders · 2018–2023
2.9M views · explainer · evergreen · Uploaded 2017-11-27

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

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3 comments from Hacker News

@eliaspro2018 · 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" - [VIDEO]

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@Svenskunganka2018 · 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? [VIDEO]

CitesView on HN
@colejohnson662023 · 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]: [VIDEO]

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