BBC Radio 3 - Operation

Operation

BBC Radio 3 broadcasts from studios inside the 1930s wing of Broadcasting House in central London. However, in addition to these studios, certain programmes and performances are broadcast from other BBC bases including from BBC Cymru Wales' Cardiff headquarters and BBC North's headquarters at MediaCityUK, Salford. The BBC also has recording facilities at the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall which can be used to record and broadcast performances at these venues.

BBC Radio 3 is broadcast on the FM band between 90.2 and 92.6 MHz as well as on DAB Digital Radio, the digital television services Freeview, Freesat, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk TV and UPC Ireland. Radio 3 programmes can also be listened to live on the Radio 3 Website through the RadioPlayer and BBC iPlayer services; the latter of these services also allows Radio 3 programmes to be heard for a week after broadcast.

On its FM frequencies, the station does not use dynamic range compression of the volume of music during the evening - this is in contrast to rival station Classic FM. As compression can be defined by the user, this is not an issue with the Digital Radio platform.

The station also uses a BBC designed NICAM style digitisation technique called pulse code modulation, which is used for outside broadcasts running through a telephone line, which runs at a sample rate of 14,000 per second per channel. A similar technique was later used for recording at the same rate. In September 2010, for the final week of the Proms broadcasts, the BBC trialled XHQ (Extra High Quality), a live internet stream transmitted at a rate of 320kbit/s, instead of Radio 3's usual 192kbit/s, using its AAC-LC 'Coyopa' coding technology. this technology was later developed so that Radio 3 is now the first BBC Radio station to be broadcasting permanently in this High Definition Sound (as it has been termed) format.