April fool or real?

[RS]

>From: Jim web
>Sent: Thursday, April 6, 2017 13:50

>I've now had a reply from someone-who-should-know and they said that ATUI
>as yet the BBC is only committed to a 4 week trial, and may then decide
>what next.

>But it is, indeed, a real test project, not an April Fool. So I'll see if I
>can set up things to do some measurements to help assess the tests.

The web page says it is there for 6 months.  However it is only one short 
piece of choral music.  I wonder what the BBC is hoping to get from it.  The 
suggestion that anyone is going to hear a difference with laptop speakers 
seems a bit odd.  Like Jim I would have thought it was necessary to be able 
to download it so that it could be played on better equipment than the 
browser was running on.  Also there doesn't seem to be anything to compare 
the FLAC with.

If the trial is to be of any use I would have expected it to include music 
which was difficult to encode and compress.  It is not my field of expertise 
but intuitively I would have expected that to be fast transients such as 
percussion, piano, pizzicato violin, harp and instruments with lots of 
overtones.  David Lake mentions audience applause.  I would have expected 
choral music to be easier to compress than these.

I came across this forum post a few weeks ago.
http://www.head-fi.org/t/728636/public-listening-test-of-codecs-mp3-aac-mp4-ogg-vorbis-and-opus
I thought post #2 by bigshot was interesting.  He says for each codec the 
point of transparency should be found.  This is the bit rate at which 
artefacts from the most difficult sounds to encode and compress cease to be 
perceptible, so there is no benefit from increasing the bit rate further or 
going lossless.  He says from his tests that is 256kbit/s VBR AAC .  If he 
is right there should be no audible difference between 320kbit/s AAC and 
FLAC.

When are we going to get 256kbit/s AC3 TV sound on the iPlayer to match the 
HD satellite broadcasts?