eli5: Why hasn’t the audio quality of “on hold” music improved in decades?
In: 934
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.
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