When I'm on hold, the audio is nearly always bad

[Roger Feeley]

Why is that? I've only encountered a few business that deliver pleasant sounding music or propaganda.

I like that there is something on the line. But it seems to me that providing something that sounds good would make being on hold less irritating.

[Garth Almgren]

It usually comes down to bandwidth, data compression, and audio clipping. There's an interesting discussion about it over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/2dwj84/why_does_hold_music_always_sound_so_terrible/

[Roger Feeley]

Thanks Garth, your reply hit the spot. We live and learn. I guess I will stop griping.

That said, I remember a time when I worked extensively with ESRI (The Geographic Information Systems people). When they put me on hold it was a pleasure. I got big band music (usually Benny Goodman) with excellent fidelity. I was tempted sometimes to ask them to put me back on hold.

[Brian Elfert]

I noticed when cell phones went from analog to digital that hold music sounded horrible. I am pretty sure cell carriers were compressing voice data to use less bandwidth which made music sound terrible.

If you have a cell phone with HD Voice or voice over LTE hopefully the problem isn't quite so bad. I actually haven't noticed the bad music quality in some time either cell phone or the VOIP phone system at work.