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This year, 90 years after the Â鶹ԼÅÄ started broadcasting the Proms - we will be making Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 3 available in a new way for the duration of the Proms. You can now stream Radio 3 in glorious ‘lossless sound’ – hearing the sound in almost as good a quality as it left our studios – in what we are calling ’Radio 3 Concert Sound’.

A lot of Radio 3’s output is specially recorded, and those recordings are carefully planned and executed by expert engineers. The people know their music, and produce world class recordings that sound beautiful – with carefully constructed bloom, balance and detail that serves the sound and reflects the room it was recorded in. Often (in certain London venues especially…) they even improve on it.

We keep this sound as pure as it can be until it leaves the studio – then we have to compress it. When we put it out at the moment – through FM, DAB and Online HD sound – there is an inevitable loss of quality as the sound is compressed to suit the means of transmission. Our highest quality HD sound is received online at 320kbps – still a fraction of the true bandwidth of the recording and with some loss that the brain has to make up for – a loss that’s hard to hear but is nonetheless there.

If we offer this sound to the audience in lossless it will be over 1000kbps and we will be conveying it to the audience as the recording left us – in Radio 3 Concert Sound. The transmissions from the Proms will be best of all, as we have a very high quality fibre connection from the Royal Albert Hall, and will not be subject to the vagaries of ISDN.

Why does this matter? Hearing an orchestra in recorded sound – no matter how good that sound is – is always not quite so good as hearing an orchestra live. Textures can often seem more limited, some instruments can’t be heard as well, you get no sense of the room in which it was recorded - in short something’s missing. Then if you further compress that you get even further away from what a real orchestra sounds like – at every stage something drops off. So if we can make the sound we put out as lossless as possible, as near to what we captured as we can, it might get us nearer to that live experience, with all its subtlety and texture. We would be getting nearer to giving the listener something that really is the best seat in the house. As we present specially recorded music every evening and weekday afternoons that matters to us and who we are.

Earlier in the year we did a ‘soft’ test of lossless. At home I listened through a Mac Mini, a Musical Fidelity V DAC, an old Rotel Amplifier and ancient B&W DM 110i speakers (the Rotel and B&W’s producing an analogue bloom to LPs when played through them). Listening to great performances on Radio 3 In Concert, and also more delicate sounds such as the Early Music Show, Lunchtime chamber concerts and live Jazz, with a greater richness than our regular online streams. There were some downsides, but on the whole it showed off some pretty excellent recordings to good effect. It was good to listen to for lengthy periods of time too, as your brain is not working as hard to fill in the gaps that lossy transmission or streaming involves.

So, I hope you can give it a try and let us know what you think. If people like it we can consider if we might do more of it – though we’re making no promises at this stage. It matters to us on Radio 3 as we have already put the work in to record great performances in a great way – so if the audience can hear it that way, so much the better.

So give Radio 3 Concert Sound a try. Give yourself to the geeky summer of sonic love that is Radio 3 and the Proms.

Alan Davey is Controller Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 3