system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does hold music sound so terrible? In this age of UHD sound how come hold music sounds like it's being played through sock in a wind tunnel?
gpt
Phone lines are designed to carry voice and not music. Humans can hear sounds from 30Hz to 22kHz but can only make sound from 300Hz to 3000Hz with out voice. So you need very different sample rates for the voice and music. This means that phone lines works terribly for music as it cuts out most of the high pitches and you are left with just the bass. Secondly as phone lines gets more and more digital we find even more ways to save on bandwidth by compressing the sounds so they take up less space. However this process uses very different compression algorithms for voice then for music. So the compression algorithms will add a lot of noise to the music as it is not designed for music. Adding to this you can have different compression for different sections of the lines as the line passes through different phone operators. So you get different types of distortions each time.