Radio 3 has a long history of pushing the boundaries with new technology, from early stereo broadcasts in 1958 through wide dynamic range high bit rate audio (HD Sound) to binaural presentation (surround sound in headphones). In collaboration with BBC R&D, we have a new experiment for you to try. For two weeks from 15th to 31st March some of our evening concerts from London’s Southbank Centre will be available in surround sound. This is an experiment so it may not work for you, if you just want to listen to the concerts in the normal way, you can enjoy them here.

There is a new standard for HTML, the language that operates the World Wide Web, called HTML5. It includes an Audio API (application programming interface) which for the first time allows a web browser to play surround sound without the need to download and install additional software. It also includes the Mediasource API, which enables us to use MPEG-DASH, a new standard for media delivery, to get the data to you. Not all web browsers fully support HTML5 (particularly the Mediasource API) yet; we have tested the experiment using Chrome under Windows 7 and Mac OSX, but it might work with other combinations of computer and browser. Although an HTML5 browser can easily play a surround sound file encoded with AAC, we think we are first to get a browser to play a live audio stream without plug-ins but would love to hear from anyone else who has done it.

You can read more about the technical aspects of this experiment on the R&D blog.