The Berliner Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall (DCH) – which has been broadcasting around 40 concerts live from the Philharmonie every season since 2008 and then offering them in a constantly growing concert archive – notches up another technological milestone with the introduction of Hi-Res Audio. The subscription-only platform now combines an ultra-high definition video signal (UHD) with a lossless transmitted audio signal in studio quality. The DCH now offers the best possible audiovisual broadcast quality in the field of video streaming, establishing a new standard which guarantees an acoustically authentic concert experience – ‘without data loss, unadulterated and direct as if from the recording studio of the Philharmonie’.

Olaf Maninger, Principal Cellist, Media Board and Managing director of Berlin Phil Media, said ‘From the very beginning, our ambition for the Digital Concert Hall was to offer our global audience a digital concert experience that is as authentic and immediate as possible by delivering the highest picture and sound quality. So I’m delighted that we’ve taken another significant step towards this ideal with the launch of Hi-Res Audio, becoming the first video streaming platform to stream classical music in lossless studio quality.’

Hi-Res Audio is being offered thanks to the support and technological advice of Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ), the Digital Concert Hall’s streaming partner since 2016. The platform uses the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). Concerts of the Berliner Philharmoniker can now be accessed from the Digital Concert Hall archive in an audio quality far superior to that of a CD at no extra cost to users. At a later date, Hi-Res Audio will also be available for the live broadcasts from the Philharmonie. Hi-Res Audio is already available in the DCH mobile apps and for Apple TV, and will soon be available for other TVs and the website. (More information about Hi-Res Audio and the download of the Digital Concert Hall mobile apps can be found here on the DCH’s website.) 

Christoph Franke, Creative Producer of the Digital Concert Hall, adds ‘The sound of an orchestra in a concert hall is certainly the most striking impression a live concert can make. So I am proud that we in the Digital Concert Hall team have technically succeeded in ushering in a new era of video streaming with the introduction of Hi-Res Audio. We can now offer the Digital Concert Hall audience the concert sound we hear in the Philharmonie’s studio in our video streams without any transmission loss.’