THE VIDEO SHELF · telephone audio compression
Hold music used to sound better. Here's why.
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.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN links it as the standard answer to why phone hold music sounds poor.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Tom Scott
- Topic
- telephone audio compression
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2018–2023
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
Relevant Tom Scott's "Things You Might Not Know"-Video: "Why Hold Music Sounds Worse Now" - [VIDEO]
eliaspro on Hacker News · 2018-03
In Ask HN: Why is telephone “hold music” still such poor quality?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]: …
colejohnson66 on Hacker News · 2023-07
In Computer memory prototype ditches 1s and 0s for denser data storage
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.