Hold music used to sound better. Here's why.
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- Опубликовано: 21 авг 2024
- It's not your imagination; hold music on phones really did sound better in the old days. Here's why, as we talk about old telephone exchanges and audio compression.
Thanks to the Milton Keynes Museum, and their Connected Earth gallery: miltonkeynesmu...
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By the way, the Milton Keynes Museum is wonderful. I know the town’s got a reputation for roundabouts and concrete cows, but the museum’s a gem.
Milton Keynes is surprisingly leafy. Almost too leafy in fact.
also for stealing a football team
i go to MK just for the IKEA
Milton Keynes is known for RedBull Racing Team base
I was expecting the TARDIS to disappear with the sound and all.
I always thought they intentionally made the music terrible so that you would hang up and customer service wouldnt have to deal with you.
Big brain
That may be the reason for WHY they use hold music. Tom Scott just told how HOW the music has turned bad. Not why it's still being used.
Worst hold music anyone???
@@Fred_the_1996 bank or America. They're hold music sounds like it's played off a 20 year old cassette tape through three stages of microphones and speakers
Same
“This is not a TARDIS, this is just a regular police telephone box.”
The disappointment in his voice was priceless.
Or is it?
(Vsause music)
I thought I heard that whooshing piano bass string getting scraped sound and expected to see a flash of light...
Free for use of public. Well I guess I'll make a call.
@@JonathanTBE I just assumed they've switched appearances since now everyone just sees those and goes OH A TARDIS!
@@JonathanTBE Rule 1: The Doctor lies.
“We are experiencing a higher than normal call volume” (for the last 10 years)
Funny how that is what about 80% of them say, just about ALL THE TIME.
“Please listen, as our options have changed.“
Because those people from 10 years ago are still on hold
@@vitesse_arnhem And that's been heard for months...
"Para Espanol, Marke Numero Dos"
1:53 We see how they put old school cell phones in special cases to protect them, and also how they put a Nokia phone in a similar case to protect the rest of the museum.
That Nokia is probably more indestructible than the case! 😆
It's to prevent people with their grimy fingers from disrespecting the holy relic with their touch.
@@syweb2 It's said that at the end of days the battery will finally die and plugging in the charger will bring about the Antichrist.
You kids never get tired of that joke.
yea, the old nokias were reusable frag grenades - you drop them and the phone splits into 3 pieces - the main part, the case, and the battery, all flying in different directions :p
the phone however remains undamaged, and works when reassembled
Amazing to think phone users in the 20s would have received much clearer sounds than we get today.
splashstrike Well, yes, and no. The bandwidth was higher, but the echo and hum was much worse.
splashstrike it's almost the 20's again
If they could afford it!
Not necessarily. The analog devices used to convert speech to analog audio signals in phones were cheaper, and had less bandwidth (ca. 100-3000 Hz) than even the earliest radio broadcast gear made specifically for voice and music combined carried better quality than that. While the standards for AM radio allowed up to 5000 Hz, the voice-only utility radio services (ham, police, fire, taxi, and the original wireless phones) had a narrower bandwidth, generally 300-3000 Hz, to save spectrum space. FM radio, and the audio portion of analog TV, could go up to 75,000 Hz (20,000 Hz for the primary audio signal and the higher frequencies for extra services such as stereo and store/elevator music, and/or reading for the blind).
@@5roundsrapid263 Delay time may have been an issue as well, not to mention the possibility of a long wait time for a line to free up for use.
But it still sounds better than "Your call is important to us, please hold."
I don't really mind hearing that phrase. It's the ten thousand years of silence that follow that get under my skin.
NoLight, YES! Especially if they have to transfer you, and you aren't quite sure if the call didn't drop somehow. At least some sort of noise lets you know it's still connected.
How about "if you don't want to hold, please try our automated system" every ten seconds after you already selected the "it's something else" option to escape the dialogue?
"Thank you for holding. We appreciate your patience... .... .... ...please hold!"
Those systems should say, after an hour or so of hold time "Y'know, if you'd just came in physically you'd probably be all done now."
"You know that new sound you're looking for? Well, listen to this!"
*static*
Maybe compression wasn't as bad in 1955
Guess you guys aren't ready for that yet…but your kids are gonna love it
@@mixerfistit5522 I mean... I listen to white noise sometimes... So not wrong
@@teiermyler4926 more like compression was non-existent in 1955
*Everywhere At The End Of Time intensifies*
"We're sorry for the delay, a support member will be with you shortly, your call is important to us"
-Plays music from the pits of digital compressed hell-
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Some have a loop of 30 SECONDS of just... that! 30 seconds... in 2 hours you'll go insane!
Always amused me vodafone hold music being vivaldis 4 seasons and sounding utterly terrible. (dunno if it still is)
They're a communications company... THEY can't get it right.
Literally the worst part is the music stops, there's a delay long enough that you thought it was a human picking up, and then it plays that "We're sorry..." bit followed by back to the music. And repeats that every 30 seconds.
Seeing as the sound is already optimised for speech, it would probably make more sense if all hold music was done by acapella groups
This.
TheYoo2b Or rappers.
It wouldn't work any better. It's optimized for a single voice at speech-level pitch and volume.
Bazyli Brzóska I think because it's one voice all hold music should be beatboxing done by the employee themselves
A plan with no drawbacks!
I spent 4 years as a software developer working for the wireless telecom industry. words like 3G and 4G? I turned that stuff from specs to working code. And, after all that time, I was not able to figure out why the phone network doesn't discard that A-law Mew-law compression and digitize calls into something a little less lossy. The answer I hear is "there isn't really demand for that." But that's ridiculous.
verdatum VoLTE is a lot better.
"There isn't really demand for that"
Nonsense. Germany, with its notoriously uncompetitive phone market, has had Deutsche Telekom offer HD Voice for a while now, and it was a major point of advertising for the transition to VoIP-based telephony. Where there's a will, there's a way.
A new standard has to be backwards compatible. Unless the old isn't used anymore.
Old people with rotary phones get confused when they have to press 1 for X support. But honestly, why would buttons be harder than rotary?
a-law and mu-law aren't the issue, that's just how the analog is sampled. the problem is that sampling is usually done at a low rate like 8khz for g.711 (which actually sounds ok, but not great) or that it's compressed more with g.729 to save bandwidth - usually the call center is the one trying to push 40 calls at once over a T1 or DSL or something ludacris. higher quality codecs are already available on the carrier networks, like g.722, but the demand is not there and would usually need to be transcoded to 711 or 729 to get to the other side
ALAW and ULAW is ISDN compression, and it's a light compression.
It's made do go over 64 or 56 kbits time multiplexed lines.
The problem is the GSM codecs made to go over a 9.6kbits link compressed by a low powered battery device.
"This is not a Tardis."
Inside the Doctor is giving a thumbs up to thank Scott for not revealing the Tardis is real.
I dunno, it makes more sense if Scott himself is the Doctor.
@@rotz394 can’t wait for that Doctor Who episode!
@@rotz394 That's why Doc Brown shouted that
Now I understand why some companies started using simple monophonic music that sounds like it was taken straight from one of those christmas lights that play songs, they are so simple that they don't get ruined.
Yep. There is one other type that can survive it, and that is the most basic elevator music, but it end up sounding like the background music of a bad porno after compression.
+Carewolf now that you mention porno, I'm thinking about people music and sound effects. what if they put on asmr?
oh wait, nvmd it would be mono
I'd argue that even speech sounds terrible over the phone - it's 2017 and we're still stuck with muffled, badly compressed phone calls even though we're capable of streaming 4K video over a mobile data connection. It gets really bad with sibilant sounds - 'f' sounds like 's'.
I generally never hear bad voice over the phone.....
except when talking with people in the US. There must be some really terribly switches there with the lowest of the low quality.
I dunno, I haven't had trouble understanding anyone on modern phones. Older cellphones, sure. In fact, it sounds nearly the same as talking in person now. Haven't used a landline in ages (nor have I knowingly called a landline), so I can't speak to that.
@TheJoebus666 The sibilant issue, reminds me of default equalizer settings on stereos! A typical setup, will be too much focus on bass, and too much focus on sibilants!
Carewolf Yep! We Americans make things cheap and sell 'em at a 500% markup!
RJARRRPCGP - Yeah, that's because idiots are obsessed with 'extreme bass'. Shopping for headphones is a nightmare because all of them unnaturally boost bass frequencies. I've not heard too many issues with excessive high frequencies though.
Everyone else - Don't get me wrong, I can (mostly) understand people fine on the phone, but when you take a step back and forget what 'phone calls should sound like' call quality is objectively bad.
As a teenager growing up in a northern English village in the 1970s, I used to go to the telephone box with a couple of friends, pop in 2 pence, dial 16, and listen to the number-one sound on Dial-a-Disc. This was a highlight at the time. Anyone else who did this? 😀
That's fascinating
Did it just play the song through once? Or did it play on a loop? (I’m starting to realise that we used to be able to dial for many services: weather, directory assistance, accurate time etc. What did I miss?)
Weekends must have been wild for you growing up
We used to have such services in my country as well. Everything from music to fairy tales and more, you could hold it to your ear and listen.
My generation equivalent is waiting 30 minutes for a song to download via dialup.
‘This is not a tardis’ sure, that’s what everyone, who suddenly realised they don’t want their viewers to know about their secret tardis for hopping from video location to other amazing video location, would say. Also, very interesting video :)
He's not a Time Lord, he just learned to fly a TARDIS back in 2017 when he did a video about the Doctor.
Yes such a relatable feeling, that's what I say too when I don't what my viewers to know about my secret tardis
At work I LOVED when we did calls over a computer. The sound was SO much better. I struggle to understand people while talking over phones it's terrible.
yes, phone quality is so disgustingly terrible that I really can't understand why everybody is putting up with it. HD voice exists but no one is pushing it
Probably because people don't talk as much as they used to? Everyone texts/facebook msgs/whatspps. At the same time home phones are disappearing, and honestly, if you removed the phone feature on my phone, I wouldn't even notice.
Phone quality is awful, I too struggle. There's so much information in the human voice that's lost you might as well text eachother and use robotic voices to read the stuff aloud. Then at least you'd have a transcript...
Nokia did try, but it didn't become a new standard. Nokia to nokia calls had a better quality to them.
May be wrong here, but aren't phone providers upgrading their networks so phonecalls that are LTE end to end will have much better sound-quality?
I was hoping for that phone box to dissapear like the tardis
Same
Tom Scott you have done animated tardises before super annoying to do remember :p
I was hoping for something like 'the museum is bigger on the inside than you might think'
I kinda expected Tom to say "Hmm.. It's bigger on the inside."
Kind expected the tardis noise then Tom's voice.
A few years ago I got a call from a gallup survey company that didn't know this... They were gauging people's preferences in music, so they played a number of samples and asked me to rate them. The horror. I couldn't identify most of them, and those that I _barely_ could, were popular enough to be very instantly recognizable if heard normally.
This really demystifies a call I had recently where the music sounded almost haunted. Every few seconds it'd cut into static and then come back while I was on hold and with the noticeable compression already it really creeped me out. Made it sound like I was the last person on Earth listening to some lonely memory of the past. Now it all makes sense!
Of course Tom is the Doctor! So much makes sense now
It's how he gets to all the exciting places he covers :)
It would explain a few things.
I mean half his videos make little to no sense to me, sooo
Yep, I think this may confirm that Tom is the Doctor.
They could just play dubstep and we wouldn't be able to tell if the connection was bad or not
No I was insulting bad connections
Yeah dubstep would not get through no matter what
it's not an insult, it's a complement to efficiency
I'd prefer that than the music i was subjected to listen to for half an hour. It was like orchestra but really scratchy and harsh
'Salsa on my calls boys, green brownie'.
The thing that always kind of makes me wary, is how so often, the hold music seems to momentarily stop whenever you make a noise, as if someone's about to come on the line. It always makes me nervous to say anything embarrassing because it makes me wonder if they're recording me even when I'm on hold. Why does the music always seem to stop whenever you talk or make a noise?
They most likely record the entire call. Just mute your cellphone until someone answers. Don't forget to unmute.
Just don't make a noise
@@jpaugh64 They don't record anything until the agent answers.
@@mediocreman2 You don't know that. There's nothing stopping them from recording everything. Even if they *say* they don't record, you have no way of proving it.
@@SchemingGoldberg In most places the law "stops" them
And there's really not much to gain from recording long stretches of probably silence, so why risk it?
I had a bit of a phobia of using phones for a long time. The telephone sound, especially when talking to strangers, made me feel really uncomfortable and nervous. I would struggle to focus on what people were saying to me.
I wonder if that's part of why the millennial/Gen Z generations tend to prefer text to phone calls. It's less of an aversion to talking to a human, and more an aversion to the sound quality itself
Honestly I don't know how anyone settles for the horrible quality. When we have cheaply available 128kbs voip.
"Milton Keynes isn't boring, it has a museum of telephone equipment!"
Honestly if all of those old desk phones are wired into the network, I'd probably have a few hours of fun just dialing the numbers and making the phones ring.
And there is Milton Keynes Dons. The greatest Football Club ever.
An aging Marlon Brando is their mascot, he gets up to hijinks on the sidelines like taking out hits on the opposing players and talking about life in Sicily to the younguns.
Isn't that where all the F1 teams are located?
@@killercaos123 A stolen football club.
That title got me good, Tom, you mischevious fellow.
What was the mischief? I don't see it.
people thought it should say old music
It’s not often I get to legitimately use a crash blossom sentence, let alone have one as the best possible title.
For anyone wondering, a "Crash Blossom Sentence" is another way of saying a "syntactically ambiguous sentence". Tom Made a video on it called "Crash Blossoms and Being Drunk: Ambiguity".
Álvaro Lopes you made a weird phrase sound even weirder to put more context into it. How did it work?
There are a select few places (in Norway, at least) that allow you to press for them to call you back when it's your turn in the queue. The only reason most places don't allow this option, I assume is because they want you to give up trying to contact them.
like i say about so many of these shitty systems, if that's not the point, it's definitely a perk.
I like the feature that some companies employ where you can input your phone number at some point during the initial call (or it can read your number via CallerID) and then it will immediately call you back when an operator/associate is available. Sadly, I've only encountered this a few times even though it is very useful.
2:25 what a bombastic piece of music
At my old job the hold music was compared to by calls as "Cruel and unusual punishment", and they begged me not to put them on hold (and this was for internal calls). And my doctor's office hold music sounds like it's being sung by a bunch of dying ducks. I just love it -mild sarcasm.
I'm watching this video 3 years late but it has, nonetheless, reminded me why I watch Tom Scott videos.
1960: “I bet in the future, telephoned will be just like talking!”
2019: *static destruction and lazy engineering*
Edit
2020: bandwidth consumed by Rona so you might as well be talking to a fax machine
Funny you say that. 1961 was the last year of manual phone exchanges!
This is lazy?
I mean, messenger, whatsapp, snapchat, discord and skype are better than calling someone on the phone
bombardier discord, really?
You suddenly go mute and have to restart your phone or PC because you dare leave it minimised for to long
@@richardhobbs7360 works on my machine ™
Let's all share the most memorable hold music we've ever experienced.
Once when I was on hold, I was treated to a lovely piano arrangement of Chrono Trigger's 600 AD overworld theme.
EDIT: Just found it again. It was the Shopify support line that played it.
A phone company with notoriously long queues played Toto's Hold the Line...
Not on hold music, but I was just at an Italian restaurant that was playing a mandolin version of "Hotel California" in the background.
I'm convinced that a piece of hold music I once heard was Lazy Afternoons from Kingdom Hearts 2. I'm still unsure about that.
My high school used The Imperial March at the beginning of the lesson. Pretty appropriate, I think.
When I was working at an IT company years ago, (think Katrina), our hold music was "Rainy night in New Orleans."
For me it's not the quality of the sound that I have problems with, it's the absolute crap music they play. And I was recently subjected to crap hold music that was on a 15 sec. loop.
between the same 15 seconds of music they play a really annoying clip of "don't worry, we'll answer your call shortly"
And the adverts for the service you're phoning up to cancel. I'd rather it just beeped occasionally to let me know it was still connected.
Agree. The music selection is horrible. I wish they'd play the sounds of their cost center manager being burned alive.
I prefer when a company just uses empty static
bobobobinalong Some companies like Nintendo use music from their games as hold music.
The irony of the situation is that when you're talking cellphone to cellphone with modern equipment? The sound is full HD stereo. But the second it hits copper on the far end, the 4kHz bandpass kicks in and you're DOOMED.
I wish theyd just REMOVE that bandpass already. KILL IT NOW
@@twentysixbit Annnnnd the Tenth Commandment is broken. "Thou shalt forever forswear and abjure the vile notion that all the world's a Vax^H^H^H Windows box ^W^W LTE-capable mobile phone." Because there is a _metric swearword-tonne_ of *businesses* out there that still use old fashioned copper POTS... we won't see the 4kHz limit go until *all that analog stuff* is melted down for its copper. Which I'll bet money won't be before the 32-bit epoch (i.e. 2038).
@@stonebear You're right. Even I knew that already, I just wish it wasn't the case.
@@twentysixbit you an' me both. I'm eyeballs deep in trying to get rid of a different legacy tech, and it's like pulling the teeth of an angry alligator... without drugs. For me or the 'gator.
What? Music doesn't get anywhere near 4 kHz. Not a single note will be missing.
3:28 "This is not a Tardis. This is litterly just a Police Telephone Box." That part made me laugh. XD
Literally, not "litterly".
Another issues is that hold music needs to be much quieter than normal speech, about -15db, this makes the quieter sections of music fall below the silence threshold so the comfort noise generators kick in and no bandwidth is used at all.
-15db is _already_ below the silence threshold.
@@Anonymous-df8it we reduce all hold music by 15db and it's the perfect level. Even U-Law has a dynamic range of 84db.
@@iPeel But -15db is less than 0db, the quietest thing audible.
@@Anonymous-df8it Oh I get it, you're being pedantic. I meant a reduction of 15db as in exactly what you specify in say Audacity or SoX.
@@iPeel I wasn't
Tom Scott for fourteenth Doctor 2020!!!
“Make Doctor Who Great Again!”
"13th Doctor" is not canon IMHO. Plus, that dumpster fire of a show changed continuity so none of the numbers are relevant any more. The only way I'd ever watch the show again is if they gave us the true 13th Doctor and retconned out the last few years so it was a nightmare or something. I can't watch a show with THAT TRASH as part of its history.
Oh. My. God.
If I could kiss you, Tom Scott, I would.
I cannot tell you how many times I have been on hold with companies and been utterly baffled by the music periodically sounding like someone had knocked the tuning dial on a radio. It drove me mad because it just made zero sense to me. You have genuinely made my day with this information.
I'm really going to have to go down and visit that museum some day, that looks incredibly interesting!
As someone who worked briefly at a call center I always wondered why music was so poorly handled by the systems. Thanks Tom for explaining.
Oh thank goodness for the ending, I thought Tom was going to go fight Daleks or something and we wouldn't see him for a while
daverapp Wrong Tom!
I am in Arcadia on Gallifrey - home of the Time Lords and here is something you might not know...
If Tom fought Daleks you would never see him again.
I don't think I've experienced this. I've heard hold music that was absolutely not suitable for being hold music because it was extremely intense instead of soothing, and I've heard hold music that was annoyingly interrupted by a repeating message every three seconds which made me wonder why they bothered with the music at all, but I've never had it break down into static.
hold music is designed to have you on edge. By the time you get through you're confused and stressed, and more easy to manipulate. That message that repeats makes it impossible to zone out while on hold- everytime it plays you think your call is being put through.
Apparently I was afraid to say this or something, but yes. YES. Do you, by any chance, exclusively use land lines?
one day this week I was on hold for an hour and a half and it never broke down into static
I hardly make calls to anyone let alone companies utilising hold music and at the age of 24 I've heard hold music break down into static so many times i can literally hear it happening perfectly in my head. Are you sure you've never heard it phase out and get crackly, that's the same thing and is so common
One time I was just getting into one of Mozart’s symphonies when it all of a sudden started over… It was just a snippet on a loop! What disrespect, I thought. Just play the whole piece!
Thank you so much for this! I know you said that speech "can survive" the quality-butchering compression, but I've noticed a decline in the quality of speech transmission too. Lately phone conversations are practically undiscernable, and I've always wondered why.
I've noticed that too. Delivered audio quality is worse than narrowband digital radio systems now. It's embarrassing.
@@Porty1119 is it possible to reoptimize the system? whether that includes cramming less data in the same space or just compressing it in a more efficient way, idk.
I got excited when I saw the police box, but then I realized it's in a telephone exhibit. It probably is just a police box.
14th doctor confirmed!!!
That'd be amazing! An interesting, nerdy and pleasant doctor of my own generation
Tom, time to start taking acting classes!
Please make it happen!
please tom
Or Matt, that would be hilarious.
Tom isn't an actor, doesn't appear to want to be an actor, or to sit in one place long enough to make a whole series of anything, however, maybe we can work it out anyways.
He's already all over the world in his videos, so why not toss in the universe.
3:16 Tom is the Doctor, I don't care what any of you say
I am just genuinely mesmerized by there being a telephone museum in Britain...
No, its a Tardis. You're just using it wrong. ^_^
I was so expecting Tardis noises. humbug.
+1, but copyright I'm suppose
Tom Scott for the next doctor!
Amazing! It's smaller on the inside.
Tom Scott for the next companion. It's always more interesting when the companion has an intellect that can keep pace with The Doctor.
true, that's the key to making it more "sci-fi-y" and less "fantasy-y" (I prefer "sci-fi-y")
"This is not a TARDIS, it's literally just a police telephone."
WE SEE THROUGH YOUR LIES, THOMAS!
So pleased to see you in our museum! Wish I'd been in town when you visited!
Take me back to the good ol' days, Tom!
Evan Blenkinsopp Why not use the TARDIS at the end of the video to do just that?
+Flo Huber Great Scott! A TARDIS?
_wait, wrong franchise about time travel..._
Evan Blenkinsopp the good hol' days
+JLC You are a sly one. ;)
Tom, seriously. Your content is absolutely brillant. Way better than so much stuff on TV, keep up the good work. Cheers.
Being a callcenter worker myself... this is actually fascinating to find out (You'd be surprised how often we are on hold ourselves to communicate with other departments, companies, or whatever)
Do the callers sound as much like they're talking through old drive-thru speakers to you as you do to us?
@@stevethepocket they absolutely do.
I love that you can actually play around with the antiques...that looks like a museum I would love to visit.
I wanted to hear some actual hold music samples :')
Right. Not a single example of said compression and cut corners
Cisco phone manager hold music is the best
Copyright from Muzak and the rights holders. Tom has good solicitors.
A RUclips guy that makes videos filled with interesting content instead of filler, likeandsubscribe, and sponsorship ads? Consider me hooked.
The algorithm really peaked right when i clicked on this video choosing to show a commercial for swedish hold-music
I still can't believe that we're stuck with /bad/ 12kbps audio. Good 12kbps audio would be fine, even.
I was about to say, OF COURSE the brit couldn't help himself and jump right into the Police Box!
"the more calls they could fit in one line, and the cheaper it would be for them"
And yet here we are paying more every year for service that doesn't change
You're still paying for a home landline phone? Why?
It also depends on the Codac as well. Depending on newer systems such as VoIP still can compress the music, but you won't hear the drops in the music notes and or static.
To be honest I try not to use conventional telephone calls any more. The quality is so bad even on a flagship smartphone that a lot of what you understand is from inference, I realised this when I moved to a new country and was having real trouble "assuming" what people saying as a learner of a new language.
I believe that conventional phone calls will be completely replaced by VoIP systems like Facebook, Skype and Whatsapp voice calls within 10 years because the quality is just so much better and data is becoming a lot cheaper.
Ewan Jones In some ways, VoIP has already replaced most phone calls from cell phones, even from the native dialer. 3 of the 4 national carrier in the US offers voice over LTE which is VoIP with highest traffic priority. Conventional VoIP can't really compete on reliability because they are best effort traffic.
When I game online, the sound coming in from my friends’ mics is way clearer than any phone call.
Kevin Benoit This is really where it's most obvious to me. I have my own TeamSpeak server and the audio there is crystal clear and uses barely any bandwidth. On the rare occasions I use the phone, I'm always surprised at how bad the quality of the call is.
@@kkparis The issue with VoIP numbers, though, is a lot of services don't accept them, which is honestly dumb, especially since the amount of people who use a VoIP number has increased a lot since 3 years after.
Number 1 on trending. well done Tom.
And the hold music is almost certainly an MP3 or similarly compressed audio. So what they play now compared to decades ago is most likely of lower quality before it even enters the company's internal phone system's compression algorithms.
Another interesting video! I work in a call center, and guess I don’t have as much issues with the hold music, but often with people calling on speaker phones, moving vehicles, muffled speech, massive echos, and calls from cellphones and getting number tones blasted in when the customer randomly touches the phone screen. Can sometimes make the calls very difficult to make out what the customers are saying.
3:33 That's a wooden blue British box.
Wow Dr. Who made a Tardis replica for this museum! Cool!
I was hoping to see the future of phone technology...
Whitfield Groves It’s a legitimate Police Box...
Dr. Who copied them, not the other way around.
Do you actually think that it was a replica of the Tardis?
That was clearly a joke
RUclips has just suggested this video to me while I'm sat on hold with Euro Car Parts (1hr 13mins so far), listening to the same 20-second loop of music over and over.
brilliant delivery, i am now a subscriber, stephen fry used to be my all knowing bloke, but now everything i know is due to tom scott.
I often wondered why my doctors hold music sounded like it had gusts of static blowing through it. Now I know.
solution: audiobooks for hold sound....uses the frequency that isnt cut (human voice) and u get some entertainment while you wait similar to music.
uh, yeah. but: make it really trolly. just have random e-books and start them not at the beginning but somewhere in the middle. Some poor bloke will be put on hold to have Snape killing Dumbledore read to him.
yes XD thx for the correction.
that could work really well when using a series of short poems or something amongst those lines.
hen that feature could be added using caller id as long as you are using the same phone number
I like the idea, but it would be confusing while you are o lyrics half listening, waiting till you here the voice of whoever answers.
Tom as the Doctor is not something I knew that I wanted, but now I want it so much!
Seeing the old step switch working was amazing, I just stay working for a telephone company and if really cool seeing how far we've come
What? The whole point of the video was to show how far we've DEVOLVED.
"That compression is great at encoding one clear voice"
Meh, it's okay.
I think there is another factor impacting the sound. I've noticed, when on hold, that quiet parts of the music are completely inaudible. It's cutting off the signal entirely when the signal strength drops below a certain threshold. I believe it is called "squelch" or "squelching" in telecommunications jargon. It makes me wonder why they often seem to choose music with lots of varied dynamics that end up being silent (or end up just the background static) in all the quiet parts, or you hear the odd note break through that happens to reach the signal threshold. Yes, I've spent far too long on hold.
Oh I have been to that museum before! I always loved playing with the phones there.
It’s amazing that Tom looks younger now than he did when this video came out 4 years ago
Of course the advance of other technologies means that it's pretty inexcusable to put people on hold with music of any quality any more. Phone calls are cheap enough that pretty much any company should be able to justify a queue where you get a call back when it's your turn, or in the worst case scenario some sort of SMS token so they can still bill the customer for the return call.
You think companies invest into customer service? It's literally bottom of the barrel tech outsourced to humans in third world countries getting payed a few dollers a day.
Watching this video whilst listening to some awful hold music right now :) Thanks for the insight Tom!
The squeak in that chair just adds to the authentic-ness!
I have passed the Milton Keynes Museum many times before but I'm never thought to go in. I'm off there tomorrow then
I'm still surprised that we haven't figured out a way to implement HD Voice across all telephony. Landlines may be harder but if we treat phone switchboards as DACs with user input for microphone and keys, it could be done, although it may be expensive. That or detecting calls from a mobile phone and using HD voice if available for the call.
it's quite ironic that when things have gone through multiple times of lossy encoding the only thing we get is a static noise which in term of entropy is at the highest it can get.
45 minutes of the same 30 second clip playing over and over just to talk to Dell's Indian call center. That was my morning.
This becomes more and more relevant with my recommendations nowadays
2:06 My current Motorola phone is in the middle :)
Most companies are running Cisco phone systems. in my own testing I have found it always adds a large ammount of static to all hold music even between 2 IP phones. so maybe thats where the static comes from. mainly down to the system only using RAW audio with a sample rate of 8000hz which on its own makes a ton of hiss and then the system seems to recompress it again adding twice the hiss
TechBase Cisco and indeed all VoIP systems that pass PSTN aLaw or uLaw (g.711) thru sound just fine; g.722 is screwy
I cant speak for all systems. Asterisk has no hiss. but my homelab Cisco CME setup has tons of hiss but only on the hold music no matter what format I use (using the recomended settings with Adobe Audition which sounds fine played back there with no hiss so its the router adding the hiss) the larger CUCM might handle hold music diffrently and have not used it before
I was really hoping this would end with Tardis noises, but Tom's delivery was better tbh.
I am honesty surprised none of the phone companies have offered uncompressed phone calls. The caveat being only if you call a device that’s compatible (ie new cellphone to new cellphone with the support) meanwhile compressed if calling the old standard.
I miss twirly phones. My grandma kept hers for an extra 20 years so we could enjoy it even if it wasn't plugged in.
I've wondered about that a few times, glad I know why now! :)
I install and support phone systems and tried to explain this to a customer before, they wanted "Back in the New York Groove" as their hold music but they didn't understand why the music sounded so bad once it was going through the phone system. I tried to explain that with everything going on in the song you will lose a lot of clarity once it's compressed and cut off. I eventually gave them an example of this by sending them the WAV file encoded the way it would be on the phone system, they then had me do this repeatedly to all the music they liked until one song sounded pretty decent even after compression...
Wealthy customers are just so used to getting their way with everything, they assume if you scream loud enough that the people around you can fix anything.
I remember good music from a local radio station on hold. It is sad, as technology increases, customer services goes away. Years ago, you could dial just the last five numbers for a local call. Now you HAVE to even use the area code to call across the street,
To this day i text people i work for rather than call them, i simply can't understand people on the phone on the mobile network. Landlines are just about useable for me
For me it's the other way around, our landline connection is very difficult to use for me, whereas if works with mobile phones.
I was hoping so much the 'Tardis' would dissapear... Wrr Wrrr Wrrrr WRRR -goneski-
What's even worse than the static is that they usually have a loop that just repeats over and over. I think that crap has got to be a big reason why people snap on customer service people.
Thank you I've always wondered why multi-billion dollar corporations could afford a high quality version of a $0.42 song.
"This is not a TARDIS, this is literally just a telephone box."
I laughed so hard at that XD
But is it bigger on the inside?