UEFA Europa Conference League Final 2025: Finding more space for sound in Polish football with OB audio specialist 120dB Sound Engineering

The audio desk in host broadcaster Polsat’s truck for the UEFA Europa Conference League final 2025

Michał Mika is on a mission to educate Poland’s ears. A broadcast audio engineer and A1, Mika is also the founder of outside broadcast company specialising in audio, 120dB Sound Engineering in Bieruń, which operates two sound trucks. Both are well spec’ed; designed around a compact Volkswagen Crafter, ST1 is still fully 5.1 capable, while the company’s 13.6m long truck called Atmos is, unsurprisingly, a fully Atmos-ready trailer with full 7.1.4 Genelec monitoring and a 64f SSL System T S500 console.

Mika is a huge advocate for immersive sound and was in the chair at another System T console for host broadcaster Polsat’s international mix at last month’s UEFA Europa Conference League final between Chelsea and Real Betis.

Working in Telewizja Polsat’s top of the range UHD6 OB unit at the Stadion Wrocław in Poland, Mika was responsible for the Dolby Atmos, 5.1, and stereo international audio feeds, and he couldn’t have been happier about it.

“Working alongside the UHD6 OB truck crew and the UEFA production team was – as always – a privilege and a joy,” says Mika. “When you work for top tier events like this, the international audio is always in Dolby Atmos. UEFA has a minimum set of requirements for microphone placement for these matches, and these are supplied on official documentation. But you can always use more microphones, and there is always scope to build the mix more creatively once UEFA is satisfied that you have covered what they need for the broadcast.”

Mika has long been an advocate for spatial audio in his home country of Poland and even had a hand in ensuring that Polsat’s state-of-the-art UHD6 was Atmos-ready, having advised them on how to design the audio room when the broadcaster was building it.

Big mix

“During the production we used about 60 mics,” says Mika. “We had 16 mics located around the pitch to capture the on-field action like the ball kicks, but for the audience we needed to capture the crowd atmosphere for the more immersive elements of the match.

“For this we use a combination of mics. We used mics in the corners of the stadium to create the 5.1 bed, and additional mics in the same locations but in the middle of the audience to build the bed for the height channels. This combination enabled me to cover the whole arena.

“We also use a Sennheiser Ambeo virtual reality (VR) microphone on the main camera position. It works really well here; firstly, it’s really small, which is important because it is directly in front of the press zone and UEFA needs to ensure that the press reporters can see everything that is happening on the pitch.

“Its compact dimensions make it a good technical solution for big games that demand immersive coverage. For some of the really big shows you can place a mic under the roof of stadium, but it is often really difficult for the technical crew from the OB truck to set up, whereas the VR is a good solution when you need to set up and dismantle everything very quickly.

“Secondly, it’s really easy to use with the System T in the truck because the console already has the Ambisonic codec built in, so we decode the mic to 5.1.4 format automatically.”

Michał Mika is a broadcast audio engineer and A1, and the founder of outside broadcast company specialising in audio, 120dB Sound Engineering in Bieruń. He recently created host broadcaster Polsat’s international mix at last month’s UEFA Europa Conference League final

More space with plugins

For the European cup final Mika also supplemented stereo feeds with a Penteo upmixer plugin for real time upmixing. “I used it during the live show to upmix some stereo feeds,” he says. “For example, when I was receiving stereo material from EVS, I used it to upmix the signals to 5.1.4, and it made mixing feel much more natural; it means that you don’t suddenly have these narrow stereo moments when you are mixing, and everything always feels wide open.”

​Mika is an advocate for this wide open sound and is working with Dolby in Poland to encourage more of the country’s broadcasters to embrace it too. There are signs that things are changing; Mika says that Polsat is starting to sell Dolby Atmos-ready decoders for end users in readiness for more Atmos content, which he is hoping will encourage broadcasters to adopt more immersive programming in the future.

The production leap, he says, is not huge. But the result is massive. “I am pushing really hard to mix and to record more immersive content in Poland, especially for live shows,” says Mika. “I sometimes have guests in the truck during matches who want to listen in to this, “fancy Dolby Atmos”. At first, they tell me that it’s nothing special, but when I switch to stereo and everything that sounded close suddenly becomes really small and really unnatural, they hear the difference it makes.

“It makes a huge difference to live sports and I now build in some immersive coverage on almost every show I work on so I am always ready to mix it into an Atmos presentation in post production,” Mikka continues.

“I know there are challenges, both with money and with technical issues, but if a broadcaster is mixing something in stereo it only needs a few extra mics on the audience area to prepare a really good immersive mix which could be broadcast on a premium channel. I am convinced that when end users hear these mixes they will push for better quality content.”

Moreover, it is good for business. Mika says he is already being awarded sports contracts due to his experience working in immersive formats. But he is still keen to sell the benefits of spatial audio to more of his clients because the benefits are not just for the consumer, but for the content provider.

“They need to understand that when they are producing music in Atmos, for example, they have better positioning in Apple Music’s algorithm. Immersive content is being promoted heavily,” he says. “It’s really important for my clients to understand that.”