technical question, not political

[space-time]

why is the sound of the people clapping so choppy? seriously it is like a badly compressed audio stream when they applaud. The speech is OK, but applaud sound is terrible.

Comcast, TiVo.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

You won't get an answer until you provide sufficient detail for folks to work with.

[Bixby]

Applause is hard to capture very well. Often times the microphones capturing the applause are a far distance from the rest of the capture electronics, and depending on the equipment you're using, that distance can have a pretty severe affect on the quick transients that make up applause audio. Then take that and put it in what really is a badly compressed audio stream - which it undoubtedly is, and you get mush. Because of the transients and broadband nature of applause, any lossy codec has a hard time encoding it. By the time it reaches the end consumer, the audio and video have undoubtedly gone through several rounds of codecs (encode/decode), which further aggravates the issue.

[rich in distress]

Audio is being obscenely compressed to get every single utterance of complainers or disturbance.
Media is fishing for news.

Edit: actually, not news, but meme/twitter material.

[DP]

You won't get an answer until you provide sufficient detail for folks to work with.

I know exactly what space is talking about! A simpler explanation is that the sound wave crests and troughs are cancelling and reinforcing each other, then getting compressed into mush.

[Onamuji]

Bixby wrote:
Applause is hard to capture very well. Often times the microphones capturing the applause are a far distance from the rest of the capture electronics, and depending on the equipment you're using, that distance can have a pretty severe affect on the quick transients that make up applause audio. Then take that and put it in what really is a badly compressed audio stream - which it undoubtedly is, and you get mush. Because of the transients and broadband nature of applause, any lossy codec has a hard time encoding it. By the time it reaches the end consumer, the audio and video have undoubtedly gone through several rounds of codecs (encode/decode), which further aggravates the issue.

Yeah.

It's an artifact from repeated lossy compression.

The audio/video is being streamed to studio or a mobile-studio (a van); from there to network/cable broadcasters and affiliates; and then it's sent to the cable companies where it's compressed a final time to travel over cable to your TV.

At each step, on route, it loses fidelity. Audio gets "tinny" or "holllow" from repeated lossy compression.

You can reproduce the effect by transcoding an audio file several times between high-and-low bitrate MP3 and AAC.