Why does Music On Hold sometimes sound bad on my cell phone?
All cell phones use a “coding” process to cut the amount of information being transmitted to optimize the small weak signal being transmitted. Each cell site is handling hundreds and sometimes thousands of calls simultaneously over the same wireless channels. The calls are instantly being optimized by being passed between the towers receiving the best signal and least traffic. The “coding” process used to transmit cell phone calls is very, very complex and geared specifically to reproducing just human speech.
Cell Service is very band limited audio frequency-wise, cutting off low frequencies & high frequencies much more so than even on traditional desk phones. Music has much more frequency range than any phone.
Very low level music signals get ignored because it’s too low and gets considered as background noise. High level music signals will become extremely distorted just because it’s too high in level.
Speech has almost no continuous tones, but music is filled with overlapping continuous tones. The “codex” looks for anything that does not look like speech and pitches it. Some early cell phone “codex” had problems with some languages that had words almost like singing.
The cell towers are switching between multiple cell phone conversations every second. Something that would make music sound very choppy.
Cell calls are constantly dropping signal for part of a second or more because of poor reception. With speech, we don’t notice those drop outs as much because we still can understand what is being said. But, with music we instantly notice the loss of the continuous tones.
Sometimes if music has a singer in it, it will be reproduced a little better because of the voice.
Sometimes, cell phones, depending how busy the local towers are with calls, will reproduce music reasonably well because call traffic is very light. Other times, because of heavy traffic or poor reception, even speech might be reduced in quality.
A typical home digital CD, DVD or MP3 player codex chops up music into more than 100,000 bits per second. Some cell phone “codex” operate at less than 4,000 bits per second. A “bit” of a difference, wouldn’t you say?
It’s interesting, when a cell phone call has poor voice quality with someone speaking, we blame the cell connection; but, when music sounds bad on a cell we just blame the music source. I think that comes from how we view music. If it’s live, it’s probably the musician fault or if we are listening to an FM station and the music sounds bad, it’s the stations fault.
Recomendation:
Change from traditional hold music to customized business advertizing much like a radio ad. We can adapt your present radio ads or create new ones with minimal or no music problems.
