eli5: Why hasn’t the audio quality of “on hold” music improved in decades?

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eli5: Why hasn’t the audio quality of “on hold” music improved in decades?

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22 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

But the quantity has improved significantly! Now it plays for much longer before anyone pick up on the other end.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

“Your question is important to us. Your question will be answered in the order received. Please continue to h—“

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Is it possible it is a psychological tactic to get people to hang up? Repetitive low quality hold music with prompts apologizing for ‘unusually high call volumes’ will eventually irritate many many people calling for low priority issues. I suspect it’s to get rid of some people who want to complain about something but then realize they have better things to do.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t want you to hold, they want you to hang up. If I ring our local surgery for an appointment I get about 5 mission statements and health warnings and a suggestion use the app (which won’t work on iPhone). This audio crap cycles for a long time because they are always receiving an unusual number of calls. I hop in the car and drive down to the surgery and make an appointment. It would be easier if they just used Beethoven fifth liked they used to.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Because telephones / voice calls have not got any better, because *they don’t have to*.

The amount of audio bandwidth required for reasonable voice transmission was worked out nigh on 100 years ago and every phone system since then has not really improved on that because it costs more money the more data you have to transmit.

Voice compresses very nicely – it’s a limited frequency range and has lots of silent gaps / pauses so can sound pretty good at very low bandwidth… when you pipe music down that same connection it is far more noticeable because the compression has to remove so much information from it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is a lot of over thinking here.

The psychology behind on hold music is pretty simple. Non-descript tunes are used so the customer doesn’t have as much focus on the sense of time. The thank you for holding bullshit is to keep the customer eager and on their toes, as each music interruption gives hope that the call is answered.

If you played the chorus of say a Beatles tune, you would be able to tell if that played through 10 times or 50 times. As a business you also run the risk of having a customer who absolutely hates the Beatles.

So you find a non offensive song with no real start or end, and loop it. Just like elevator music.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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