Even on new devices, telephone hold music seems to be rife with static/noise. Just my experience? What's holding this back?
Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
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Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#2Telephone hold music is never going to sound that good, at least not if you are listening to it through the narrow bandwidth of a analog phone line or the highly compressed signals used for cellular and VoIP.
Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#3A better question is why telephone quality is bad in general. I assume it's a bandwidth issue related to the technological limitation when it was rolled out.
Whenever I do a FaceTime voice call I'm always shocked by the quality of the audio.
Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#4Compression artifacts
Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#5It maybe conversion from the original MP3 format to the GSM, ULAW format some PBX VoIP systems use.
Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#6A better question is why telephone quality is bad in general. I assume it's a bandwidth issue related to the technological limitation when it was rolled out. Whenever I do a FaceTime voice call I'm always shocked by the quality of the audio.
IIRC, the cell phone voice codecs are at an absurdly low bitrate (1.2kbps?) and highly optimized for human voice only, so voice is acceptable and everything else sounds like trash.
Analog landlines used 64kbps codecs (after the analog loop to your house) that were flexible enough to be abused to transport 56kbps of data.
I'm pretty sure nothing else lower quality codecs than cell phone voice.
Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#7I've never understood why they didn't just make music that worked under the constraints.
Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#8Relevant Tom Scott's "Things You Might Not Know"-Video: "Why Hold Music Sounds Worse Now" - https://youtu.be/w2A8q3XIhu0
Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#9Limited bandwidth. Line is optimised for voice comms frequency.
Re: Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?
#10I've never understood why they didn't just make music that worked under the constraints.
Because that costs money and might be more grating. It might not improve the customer experience much at all.