The Contribution of the BBC to Hi-Fi Part One

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) was founded on October 18, 1922, as the British Broadcasting Company by a group of wireless manufacturers. It was later established as a public corporation under a Royal Charter on January 1, 1927, which is when it officially became the British Broadcasting Corporation, as it is still known today.

Over the years, the BBC has made several significant contributions to the field of hi-fi audio. This podcast is the first of a series of three in which we will explore the contribution and influence of the BBC to British hi-fi and beyond.

The music that accompanies this podcast reflects the BBC's long contribution to classical music, especially through its annual Proms season broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall annually by the BBC since 1927. They had started in 1895 under Robert Newman and conductor Henry Wood.

Following Newman's death and financial struggles for the orchestra, the BBC took over the running and broadcasting of the concerts, initially from the Queens Hall.

In 1941, the Queen's Hall was destroyed by an incendiary bomb during the Blitz, forcing the Proms to move to its iconic current home, the Royal Albert Hall.

The BBC retains ownership of most of the Proms concerts, so we feature public domain versions of pieces of music associated with the Last night of the Proms from the musopen.org site, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence, together with historical performances from the Internet Archive in the Public domain.

This podcast provides an overview of some of the BBC historical contributions. The next episode will focus specifically on BBC innovations in loudspeakers and digital audio, and the third will be a generated discussion of both podcasts

In the first part of this podcast, we will consider the contribution of the BBC to audio engineering through its library of peer-reviewed engineering papers, which made a very significant contribution to transforming hi-fi from an art form guided by guesswork into a precise, repeatable science.