Sports Audio Summit 2024: Immersive sound and inclusivity discussions top the bill at bustling London event
The third annual Sports Audio Summit was the biggest one yet, attracting more than 100 sound professionals from around Europe for a day of debate, discussion and insight. Kevin Emmott has the full story of the day.
Sports Audio Summit 2024, sponsored by Audio-Technica, got off the starting blocks with a two-hander from this summer’s Olympic Games, with Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) senior manager, audio, Nuno Duarte (pictured above and below, left) looking at the Games from the host broadcaster’s perspective, and NBC Sports and Olympics, senior director of audio engineering Karl Malone (pictured below, right) representing one of the world’s biggest rights holders.
Immersive audio is no longer as challenging as it once was: it’s now produced as standard. But with over a hundred audio A1s, 90 audio consoles, 3,680 microphones and a 509 strong crew to manage, producing over 11,000 hours of live audio content was.
“We had 128 A1s mixing during the Games, and all of them have to provide a consistent product across every sport, all in 5.1.4, for two weeks straight. And that is difficult,” said Duarte. “Difficult because we have many different cultures and experiences to manage, and some sports are very difficult to mix. This year the technical audio setup was not the most difficult part.”
Meanwhile, Malone noted the event was NBC Olympics’ most successful ever, broadcast across more channels, with a significant increase in online viewers.
“There were 4.1 million viewers that accessed the Peacock streaming service on NBC, with a 500% increase on social media viewership over the Tokyo Olympics,” he said, leading to new initiatives to drive engagement, such as the application of Apple Airpods to generate content in the training enclosures.
Making it personal: The future of audio tech
More new initiatives, and specifically next-generation audio (NGA) initiatives, were on the bill in the next session, a joint discussion chaired by consultant Roger Charlesworth. Malone remained on stage and was joined by BBC senior audio R&D engineer David Marston, Salsa Sound co-founder and director (and Associate Professor in Audio Technology at the University of Salford) Dr Ben Shirley, and Dolby Laboratories senior staff architect James Cowdery.
The subject of audio personalisation was high on the agenda, a theme that panellists would return to throughout the afternoon, as the discussion looked at how technologies are coming together to make the possibly of user personalisation a reality.
“For us, microphones are not just sound recorders, they are data gatherers. There’s so much data out there, and microphones are constantly sampling and capturing that data.”
“Metadata is the answer, but where we’ve really struggled in the past was having a single concept for metadata that travelled well across different transports,” said Cowdery. “I think with Serial-ADM we have a really good platform, with metadata that can flow nicely and a lot of different standards all coming together.”
Marston added that while personalisation could put the power into the hands of consumers to deal with a range of challenges, from hearing loss to neurodiversity, it will be important to set limits on what the consumer can modify to maintain the artistic integrity of the content creators: “This is where it is important to have metadata in place to set rules and limits on how much can be modified.”
First on the throttle: MotoGP excelling in audio
After 32 years working with superbikes, Dorna Sports head of global technology for MotoGP Sergi Sendra (pictured, below) was next on stage for a spirited and passionate discussion with SVG Europe editor Heather McLean about sound in the saddle. Sendra has spent the last 10 years standardising the audio coverage of MotoGP across multiple international territories, and the championship now makes use of 200 mics, half of which are located on the bikes themselves.
Sendra identified several key advances and how working directly with partners like Lawo and Audio-Technica, as well as multiple engineers, has helped accelerate the sport’s coverage. And he’s not finished yet, working on adapting audio technology into helmets to literally get into the heads of the riders. But it’s not an easy adaptation.
“In Formula One, the driver is sitting in the car with an in-ear with speakers inside a silicon block, and because he’s not moving, it’s comfortable,” he said. “When we test it in MotoGP, the rider is moving all the time and feels it because he’s pushing 350km per hour.
“The helmet is very serious. So we are working with 10 different helmet manufacturers; we are talking to the 22 riders; we are talking to the engineers; and we need to do all of this passively. It will take a long time, but we are trying to succeed within all the parameters we have.”
Presentation: Masterclass: Audio Intelligence – Real-world use of AI in live broadcast audio
With AI and cloud production both hot topics over the last two Sports Audio Summits, two technology vendors both provided insights into more recent developments, with co-founder and CEO of Salsa Sound Rob Oldfield and SSL director of product management Tom Knowles both providing overviews of recent projects and providing a glimpse into what might come next.
“For us, microphones are not just sound recorders, they are data gatherers,” said Oldfield. “There’s so much data out there, and microphones are constantly sampling and capturing that data; that’s why we’re so passionate about AI. It’s all data processing, and can we use that data to do some really cool stuff.”
Some of that cool stuff includes Salsa’s MixAir software which automates audio mixing based on detecting sound patterns like referee whistles, hockey pucks and speech; speech separation to subtract speech from a mix; algorithms that detect whether something is close-up or distant on video and adjust the background audio accordingly; live human motion tracking to detect movements in order to automate audio faders; QC that can monitor hundreds of audio feeds simultaneously; and, in a throwback to an earlier discussion, speech intelligibility metering to display the clarity of speech within a real-time audio mix.
Presentation: Cumulonimbus: The continuing evolution of cloud in sports broadcasting audio
Knowles ran though a recent workflow in the US, explaining how, in his words, “our US customers, are a little more gung-ho about public cloud and that’s where the majority of our public cloud trials are taking place. Some are in a remote production model moved into a distributed workflow, some are about disaster recovery, and some is to provide additional capacity.”
Knowles illustrated this by referencing a distributed production example where a venue in Virginia was connected to a control room in Connecticut via AWS, with a latency of 13 milliseconds.
“Everyone has concerns about latency when talking about the cloud, but this proved that it is perfectly possible to do it. And if things move, like if the event has moved to the west coast, the operational experience is identical.”
Cloud-based intercom at global sporting events
The cloud was also the subject of the next session, with Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) director of audio technology Anthony Sachot (pictured, above) and Telos Alliance’s VP of business development Martin Dyster discussing Telos’ cloud-based Infinity intercom system used by WBD during Paris 2024.
Emboldened by the pandemic, Dyster explained how Telos developed its matrix-less hardware Infinity intercom into a software-only system, and how Eurosport helped develop it further with a series of Proofs of Concept between June 2022 and May 2024. Sachot explained how WBD applied the system in three different ways in Paris this summer.
“The first as a backup platform, in case our main system went down, to keep the offices, workspaces and other operations could continue,” he said. “The second usage was for field reporters using the panels on their smartphones, connected to the PCR through the system.
“The third usage was to expand system capacity of the current system. We had to coordinate around 50 concurrent events, and it enabled us to provide panels for people working from more spaces.”
Paving the way: Pushing sports audio forward through diversity and inclusion
The penultimate session of the day aimed to find solutions for some of the most complex challenges in today’s broadcast audio industry. But none of them were about AI, metadata or the cloud.
The broadcast audio industry has long suffered from a diversity problem, and even the most cursory of glances around the auditorium showed how widespread that problem is. This panel alone represented a 300% increase in the total number of women that were on stage at the Sports Audio Summit last year, as Heather McLean (pictured below, far left) led BBC Sport operations executive, sound and comms Lead Lucy Moss (below, second left), Sky Sports sound team leader Rachel Oliver (pictured below, far right), and freelance sound assistant Hazel DeAyr (pictured below, second right) in a discussion on how the industry can be more inclusive.
“I’m a freelancer; I don’t have a place where I can have formal, everyday training,” said DeAyr, who has over 20 years of live sound experience and crossed over to broadcast television in 2017. “I need the support to enable me to develop. There are policies from companies that say they’re going to do this, but you have to follow it through. You can’t just do the training at the entry-level.”
“Your whole department has to support these people as they move through the layers. You’ve got to keep having conversations and see how they’re going.”
While this does sometimes happen, it requires managers to be brave enough to provide it. Moss said: “In the summer we had as a last-minute requirement for a floor assistant in Paris so I rang Hazel. It became a much bigger role, doing the comms for the camera and lighting operators, operating the sound desk and managing the routing…I already had engineers who had done all pre work and people on site to help who knew exactly what was needed. I didn’t have a problem because I had every confidence that she was going to be fine. I just didn’t tell her before she turned up!”
The discussion was wide-ranging, but all agreed that fostering a more inclusive and supportive environment to develop people is important, and it is something that Oliver is actively encouraging at Sky. “It’s putting that time in, having that conversation and keeping (them) on that path that is going to encourage and grow and achieve,” she said. “And again, it’s getting the whole team to support them. Your whole department has to support these people as they move through the layers. You’ve got to keep having conversations and see how they’re going.”
Balls and mics: Bringing immersive audio action from European football to viewers
The final session chaired by Professor Felix Krückels from the University of Darmstadt Broadcast Production and System Design department continued the theme of encouraging new talent, in a conversation with Host Broadcast Services (HBS) engineering manager Nicolas Brie on the evolution of immersive audio in football across Europe. They spoke about how the application of plugins in the signal chain was used to reduce spill and deliver clean objects at the 2024 Euros delivered a better product – at the expense of latency – but also about how HBS gave over 20 students invaluable real-world experience working in sound at the games.
Tech Spotlights
In between the main sessions were bitesize ‘Tech Spotlights’ from Audio-Technica and LAMA, two of the event’s sponsors.
First up, project manager of broadcast partnerships at Audio-Technica Rodrigo Thoma presented its BP3600 immersive microphone, which features eight hyper-cardioid condenser capsules in a unique hedgehog configuration to capture accurate spatial awareness in high-pressure environments like the Olympic Games in Paris. Designed in collaboration with users, it gives sound designers the freedom to mix and produce three-dimensional soundscapes very easily, and because it is equipment agnostic, it works with everyone.
Meanwhile, the sole aim of LAMA’s suite of software-based solutions is to create more content for less financial outlay and is, according to LAMA CCO Co-Founder Ewan Cameron, “part of a new wave of innovative software companies offering an alternative to these traditional hardware workflows.” Processing agnostic, compatible with third-party hardware and any audio protocol-agnostic, and interoperable with other software via APIs, LAMA’s suite of audio software includes Lama Connect, Lama Mix, and Lama Auto Mix.
Sports Audio Summit 2024, sponsored by Audio-Technica, took place at Kings Place in London on 21 November.