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"Well it has finally happened," esteemed classical recording engineer Tony Faulkner wrote me in a recent email. "I have engineered my first live webcast and MP3 download-only release."

On April 23, Faulkner engineered the live webcast and recording of the Philharmonia Orchestra, considered the first-ever "rich media webcast" by a UK orchestra. The event was primarily sponsored by European Internet provider BT (British Telecommunications) and took place as part of the launch of the Philharmonia's new music education website, The Sound Exchange.

Web connection bandwidth permitting, music fans from around the world were able to tune into "Philharmonia Radio" to watch a live broadcast from the Royal Festival Hall of the Orchestra and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen performing Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, with soloist Susan Bullock; Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra; and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.5, with pianist Emanuel Ax.

The web broadcast began two hours before the actual concert and included a pre-concert talk with Jon Tolansky and Emanuel Ax live from the RFH concert platform as well as live interviews with the artists. During the webcast, web viewers were able to see and hear the orchestra, as well as view live interactive program notes, synchronized on-screen with the live performance. They were also able to chat online with other listeners, the live audience, and performers.

A few days after the live performance, the Philharmonia Shop began selling high-quality (320kbps!) remastered MP3 downloads of tracks from the concert at a price of £1 per track, or £3 for the whole concert. The audio and visual material from the event, and all the related resources, continue to be available for free streamed viewing from The Sound Exchange website.

Even though the performance would end up as a web stream and set of compressed audio files, Faulkner says he stuck to his typical high-rez recording approach. "The recording was done up to the usual standards as far as our end of the chain was concerned," he says. "We used an analog mixing console and the outputs were split between the live webcast system and recording 88k2/24 audio files straight to hard disk."

To prepare the MP3 downloads, Faulkner took the 24-bit/88.2kHz digital audio files home, loaded them into his SADiE workstation, and created a 44k1/16 file-set as he would for a typical CD release. "However the Philharmonia did not send the masters to a CD factory; instead we delivered 44k1/16 WAV files, which were MP3 encoded within the Philharmonia's own IT department and were uploaded onto a server for customers to download."

Faulkner explains, "Our downconversion from 88k2 to 44k1 audio sampling rates was done by averaging adjacent pairs of samples with no additional filtering. The truncation from 24-bit to 16-bit was dithered with two LSBs of flat dither. While the audio was in the workstation I removed some of the louder extraneous noises from the venue and from the audience—coughs, sneezes, etc."

"The subjective quality of MP3s depends on a number of variables," says Faulkner. "The compression rate, the particular engine which was used for the encoding, then of course we have the variabilities of different PC/soundcard combinations. Most soundcards within PCs are a bit iffy from an audiophile point of view, especially in terms of noise-floor and subtlety. If I were planning to listen critically to such a download, I would probably drag the MP3 into SoundForge or Nero and then burn a conventional CD carefully from the 'exploded' decompressed version."

Though his pristine audio files were compressed and processed, Faulkner feels that the Philharmonia has made a bold move by using such high data rates (320bkps) for the audio as well as for the video streaming. "It is great for people in the New World with fast broadband. We are lucky to get 500k broadband speeds here in the UK, and many people still have 28.8k dial-up. Still, they are right to look to the future, also to stick to their guns about trying to get decent quality. Most classical downloads here are 128k if you are very lucky."

But in the end, Faulkner sums up his experience thus: "The whole business of how data compression impacts on pure sound sources is a topic of its own. MP3 is to music as JPEG is to graphics. Give them a chance with TLC and low compression rates, and they do a decent job. Set the autopilot to maximum compression to make the files as portable and fast as possible, and they are unrecognizable for those of us with high expectations."