What minimum bitrate should I use for whisper?

I’m transcribing files that are around 25MB—sometimes slightly bigger. Those currently have a 128k bit rate.

Instead of cutting the files into parts, I figured I might lower the bitrate instead. Or would that reduce the transcript quality?

On the open source whisper project, someone wrote that internally whisper is downsampling to 16k.

Is that the same for the whisper-1 model? Can’t find that in the docs.

If so, downsampling the input files couldn’t possibly harm the transcript quality—right?