During 2011, the Proms featured a number of light music concerts. Both film and light music have been given increasing coverage in recent years and, while some of the more dyed-in-the-wool classical music lovers may dislike this fact, we are actually seeing the revival of something that was present in the early years of the Proms, long before the BBC took them over. Though back then it was 'light' works by composers of the period, not MGM musicals! Another long-established feature of the Proms is, of course, the 'sing-along' that takes place on the last night of the festival. Three feeds As in previous years, I used the 2011 Proms as an opportunity to compare the different methods employed by the BBC to deliver music to our homes, and managed for the first time to include satellite TV and DAB along with the BBC iPlayer as my sources. Some of the results I obtained were intriguing. You might think DAB and digital TV provide a wider audio bandwidth than the iPlayer does because they use a higher sample rate. But it turns out that for both TV and DAB the BBC deliberately limits the audio bandwidth to about 17kHz during the MP2 encoding process via the use of a low-pass filter. This forces the encoder to devote all its output bitrate to details of the musical spectrum below the cut-off. The argument is that the result sounds better than if some of those precious bits were 'wasted' on signals above 17kHz.
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