Fairly often, I’ve noticed that when I call any type of large enterprise, be it a government agency, financial institution, retail chain, etc., when I’m place on hold, the sound quality of the music is terrible. It sounds, in fact, much like a radio that’s out of tune. Before I realized that this is a common phenomenon, if I was using my mobile phone I’d worry about my battery or the signal strength.
When they finally answer you, though, then the sound is fine.
What’s going on here??
No answer, just that I have this occur every time I call Verizon FiOS customer service. The music “breaks up” even though the automated voices and human voices I talk to are fine. SWAG is that the music is generated from a single source and broadcast around to the phone switches using an unreliable transmission technology. Regardless, putting anything this shitty over a phone line does not give one a favorably impression of one’s phone company.
It was the same when I had to keep calling Expedia a few months back regarding my boarding passes. Still no answer, though!
I can only speak for the phone systems I manage (usually asterisk VOIP based), but the answer is the codec used for phone systems is really not ideal for anything other than voice – and sometimes, barely that. Listen to any music that’s usually at a format of for example, GSM at 8Khz (a standard rate for normal phones) and you’ll hear similar.
Also, some phone systems have an audio input jack and they take a radio and use this as the source. If the radio station gets detuned, no one will notice until someone complains on the phone. This was the case with an old system we used to have.
That’s how it was at my old office. You beat me to it.
Muzak is often distributed via subcarrier on commercial FM stations. If it is only used for hold music, nobody who can fix it notices if/when the tuner drifts off frequency.
I suspect this is the answer. The compression and bandwidth limitations inherent in landline POTS or voice CODECs in digital systems may be non-hi-fi, but it’s not going to introduce actual music static into the line.