In article ,
Richard
Robinson wrote:
It's true that the sound quality doesn't always match the 320k aac
from Radio 3 via iPlayer. But the 50fps video you can get (if you do
it in time) of such things seems pretty enjoyable to me.

That doesn't bother me much. High quality is to be had when possible,
but if it's a cruddy recording of worthwhile music, I'll listen and
enjoy.

cf below.

All that said, yes, listening to sound-only can be very enjoyable.
Depends what kind of experience you fancy. Having the choice seems
good to me.

Sound-only, yes. If I go to a live performance it's "I love work, I can
watch people doing it for hours", but it's not often I find the visuals
important (is this maybe age-related ? I started listening to music
before the pop video became a Thing).

The visuals can be useful for an opera or ballet. I confess I generally had
little interest in either *until* I could watch them in decent quality as
well as having the sound in decent quality. To me, that made a significant
difference even though I prefer closing my eyes when listening to other
kinds of music which have no specified relationship to anything that it
accompanies.

I stopped buying DVDs of classical music when they all went to 'NTSC' which
looks much poorer than even 'PAL' ( both labels being misleading, but they
are the terms used on the DVDs.) Blue Rays or HD recordings (or see below)
can be rather better.


Or maybe it's just me, I don't really Do videos or films much, either.

I'm happy watching old films. Even if the sound quality is poor. Content is
what really matters.


Personally, I think my 50p a day is well spent just to get such things.

Plus, in my case, the once-off cost of buying the equipment.

get_iplayer is your friend. If you have a computer with a decent display
you can get a lot of what the BBC broadcast in quite decent vision and
sound. For some years now, that has been my main route for BBC TV and Radio
3.

We do use a TV set as a display in the living room to watch AV. But nothing
fancy. However the bulk of what we watch is now fetched using get_iplayer.

That said, the 'real' hi-fi is in another room with no large screen. Just a
small monitor out of the line of vision when listening to audio.

Jim

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