why is hold music usually a much lower quality than having a phone conversation?

Question

why is hold music usually a much lower quality than having a phone conversation?

In: Technology

Answer 1

[Relevant Tom Scott video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2A8q3XIhu0).

In short, phone calls are compressed to allow sending more data and/or multiple calls on the same wire. This compression is optimized for human speech, but not for music. In particular, it commonly discards frequencies that are outside of human speech frequency range, but are still in music frequency range.

Answer 2

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