Hold music used to sound better. Here's why.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN links it as the standard answer to why phone hold music sounds poor.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2018 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends eliaspro · 2018-03 · on “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]
Recommends colejohnson66 · 2023-07 · on “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]
Cites Svenskunganka · 2018-05 · on “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]