(no subject)

[gfish]

Why does all hold music have repeating sections of static? Surely they aren't all using analog tape still...

Comments

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

I suppose they don't have any financial reason to upgrade...

[caladri.livejournal.com]

I've met CD based systems that did that. Mostly, in between songs you hear just how noisy the line is. I've never met a really clear phone line.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Or do you mean repeating static as in static every 10 seconds, even over the music?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that. I've run into the exact same thing on multiple systems.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

It's been so long since I've used a land line regularly that my default has become to assume it's a GSM artefact.

[tnarg42.livejournal.com]

When I was a Sprint customer (or rather, my employer was), I was always amused by their cell phone codec-friendly hold music.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

I worked at a place that had hold music that was just a radio station on a boom box spliced into the phone system.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

That's what ours is.

The secretary before me used to put CDs on the boom box, but then they're on repeat all day. This way at least I can put the hold button on speakerphone if I feel like listening to the radio. (For a while I kept it on NPR just so I could do that, but people mostly don't like to be on hold on NPR.)

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Drop $300 on a music-on-hold system, and see if you want to drop $500 on a new digital one five years later.

[cow.livejournal.com]

At DUSA, we had a crazy little device that you could save MIDI files to, and then it plugged in with a standard headphone jack to the phone system. It even had its own extension that you could call and listen to the hold music from your desk (...why, I have no idea, except it was sometimes fun to put it on speaker and torture coworkers)...