Tech focus: The audio innovations helping to deliver the drama of live sports By David Davies Friday, January 17, 2025 - 09:41
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In a phenomenally competitive sports broadcasting landscape, it's not surprising that technologies which enrich the home viewers' experience have achieved such traction in the last decade. If the widespread deployment of UHD and HDR have perhaps been the most salient developments, immersive and spatial audio technologies - and the ongoing refinement thereof - have surely been of comparable importance.
Invited to nominate the most important audio innovation of the last few years in terms of capturing and evoking the atmosphere of live sports, Genelec communications director Howard Jones notes: The introduction of immersive audio has brought a new level of atmosphere and emotional impact to sports broadcasting, in the same way as it's transformed the movie and music experience. When you consider that live TV sound in the 1980s was still mono, the progress has been profound, and the work of the OBS in standardising around the 5.1.4 format for Olympic coverage has been significant. Once immersive audio is employed for delivery, the creative possibilities it opens up for the whole audio chain from acquisition onwards are extremely exciting.
Dave Letson, VP of sales at Calrec, notes the role of new audio technologies in a rapidly moving media landscape in which content providers must produce more compelling content, more efficiently, and deliver value to retain viewers and ad revenue . But he says that immersive must be supportive of storytelling and sympathetic to the content , adding: For live sports, an immersive mix can place viewers directly into the emotional centre of the crowd. With 3D soundbars and binauralised headphone downmixes delivering readily available immersive content, consumers have easy access to this content, but broadcasters must retain control of when it is - or isn't - appropriate.
While the ability to comprehensively capture the audio at sports events is not new, it's only recently that it has been possible to maintain spatial delivery all the way through to the viewer at home. SSL broadcast product manager Berny Carpenter notes: There are many parts of the delivery chain: consoles supporting immersive channel and bus formats plus providing 3D panning tools; encoders and decoders capable of creating and unpacking the newly formed content; plus the transmission chain required to get the encoded signal from the broadcaster to the viewer's television. The availability of these has grown over the last few years and consequently we are seeing growing use of immersive technologies.
Streamlining delivery
Therefore, much of the R&D currently taking place in this space is concentrated on supporting and, ideally, streamlining various aspects of the delivery chain. Referring to SSL's System T platform, which includes native support for immersive audio, Carpenter says we know there is a lot going on while mixing live sports, so have ensured the necessary tools are all under the fingers of the operator. Immersive panning, fold-down, metering, monitoring and FX support mean that - from a mix perspective - it's made as simple as possible for the operator creating the immersive content. System T also includes the ability to natively decode and manipulate the output from Ambisonic microphones, often used at sports events. This is partly for the spatial capture but also for the ability to focus the captured content.
For Genelec, there is a great emphasis on allowing A1s to make accurate and reliable mix decisions. The level of uncoloured detail our The Ones' three-way coaxial studio monitors provide - both on and off axis - and the ability to precisely localise sounds makes mixing in immersive that much easier. As well as their compact form-factor lending itself to OB trucks, these monitors can also be used with the new UNIO Personal Reference Monitoring solution that allows mix engineers to move seamlessly between in-room monitors such as The Ones and accurate, personalised Genelec headphone monitoring for a smoother, faster workflow .
Once immersive audio is employed for delivery, the creative possibilities it opens up for the whole audio chain from acquisition onwards are extremely exciting
Flexibility - as well as scalability - of production is also integral to Calrec's latest development in this space, True Control 2.0, which Letson describes as the company's new remote production superpower , delivering expanded levels of control in two key areas. Firstly, it gives users far greater levels of remote control without the limitations of mirroring or parallel controlling, with control of an expanded feature-set including EQ, dynamics, routing, direct outputs and delay. More fundamentally, it gives broadcasters and content providers unparalleled flexibility to scale their remote productions as needed by expanding the number of products it works with.
Dr Renato S Pellegrini, manager ProLabs, Ambeo Immersive Audio at Sennheiser, notes the increased importance of spatially-distributed sound that can maintain continuous context as well as atmosphere as immersive production has become more commonplace. The technology behind this requires detailed spatial resolution and the ability to mix for various output formats simultaneously. As a result we have seen more and more mixes based on immersive formats with automatic downmixes to surround and stereo formats.
Renato S Pellegrini, Sennheiser
In this regard, Pellegrini points to the recent development of the Ambeo 2-channel spatial audio plug-in for live operation with Merging Technologies' Anubis audio interface, which allows for careful monitoring and tweaking of such automatic workflows. The technology was firstly
