Apparently I am very late to to this, but anyone who thinks Beyoncé was lip-syncing the Star-Spangled Banner at the inauguration must be freakin’ deaf.

I mean, you can hear the audio from the monitors on the microphone, so it sounds like she’s double-tracked. There’s around a 20-30ms delay. Listen for it; I’m guessing most but not all people will be able to hear it as I’ve noticed anything below 50-60ms is difficult for you mortals to discern. 😉

And the performance, while great, is not studio great. Lip-synced renditions are usually perfect, but her actual performance* is not. Hell, as this article points out, she’s signing in an entirely different key at the beginning! That’s the second thing I noticed before I’d even read the article (the first being the monitors being too loud).

You can also hear the wind in the microphone quite loudly on two occasions, for which the sound engineer (probably frantically) adjusts for.

I’m wondering what sort of weird weed people have to be smoking to even suspect that’s lip-synced.

*It’s likely the very best any human could do under those weather and audio conditions