Rates of play

摘要

Are we far less likely to note imperfections in audio when watching video at the same time? Alternatively, might seeing video somehow cause us to 'enhance' what we hear, to the point that we unconsciously re-create details the audio is failing to provide? Both these questions came to mind when recent events led to a discovery that really surprised me. I tend to use the cross-platform computer program 'get-iplayer' to download radio and TV programmes from the BBC iPlayer. Until around the end of June I could get 320k AAC for the audio across all the BBC's TV and radio programmes and assumed it had adopted this as its 'best' quality standard across the board. However, the best audio quality for TV streams abruptly went down to 128k AAC. And this, alas, just before the Proms season began.