Tech Focus: Digital Mics, Part 1 - The Future Is Here

Having long resisted the transition, broadcast audio's most fundamental element is finally entering the digital era

About 25 years ago, a microphone manufacturer provided a demonstration of a digital microphone for Nashville's pro-audio community. After hearing the benefits of marrying analog and digital technologies into a single integrated package, a reporter asked if this particular digital microphone was simply a conventional mic with an A-to-D converter placed further up the mic stand.

The reporter was not called on again.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the previous decades' digital-audio experiments were fashioned into a cornucopia of practical products. It was a period when linear (tape-based) audio formats were fully overtaken by nonlinear, digital ones, including various flavors of disks and, ultimately, the cloud.

The microphone, however, largely refused to take part in that transition: no matter how you slice it, a microphone still has to change very analog air pressure into an electrical signal. Once you got past that, though, the digital world was your oyster, and, in the past few decades, what you could do with that signal, via digital processing and IP transport, became its own universe.

Now, finally, the microphone is entering the digital era. The inflection's vanguard includes the Shure DCA901 and Voyage Audio's Spatial Microphone. Each has distinct characteristics and features, but they share the fundamental aspects that make them digital: most notably, the ability to be integrated directly onto a network and controlled as part of a larger workflow, along with integrated A-to-D conversion.

(Audio-Technica has, according to sources, been developing and testing its own digital microphone for several years. Prototypes - digital versions of its 4027 and 4029 stereo shotguns and the 4050ST side-address stereo - have been field tested by FOX Sports, NBC Sports, and others. The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

A New Frontier

Independent audio-production consultant Roger Charlesworth, who has been following the nascent category for years, contends that the practical advantages of a digital microphone have already taken it out of the theoretical realm and onto the field.

Being natively digital allows them to be networked, he explains, comparing the digital microphones' evolution to that of digital photography's transition from analog to digital. One cable connects a microphone that may have eight outputs, and those outputs always come up in the right order; you don't have to have a big stage box next to them; they're very easy and quick to deploy.

We've seen, he continues, where FOX [Sports] on the college shows is setting these things down to pick up marching bands and that kind of sound. It's a network device with just one skinny, cheap cable that makes them faster and using less labor to deploy.

He cites a digital microphone's integration of key processing, such as A-to-D conversion, and the fact that its pre-amp would be perfectly matched to the microphone itself instead of possibly being at the mercy of one already inside a camera, for instance, all of which can enhance sonic quality. It happens right there at the source, he notes, so you get this kind of maximum fidelity from the microphone. You get optimum compatibility.

Additionally, long cable runs across sports fields are eliminated by having the microphone on the same network as other production-capture elements, which eliminates cable noise. The benefit for motorsports alone is huge, says Charlesworth. And they're network-ready: you plug into the network port on the camera, and the camera supports the connection to the truck.

Complexity Makes the Case for Digital

Voyage Audio co-founder Steve Silva - whose immersive Spatial Mic has made appearances on broadcasts of the World Cup, the NFL Draft, NHL on ESPN, and Wimbledon tennis - says that the digital microphone's identity does depend somewhat on its very analog diaphragm's proximal relationship to the things that make it digital, such as its A-to-D converter and pre-amp.

The majority of microphones are absolutely still analog microphones, he points out. The ability to ride on a network is the defining factor, I think, for this category.

It was the increasing complexity of broadcast-sports production workflows, he contends, that made the case for creating IP-connected microphones almost inevitable: increased channel counts going over analog cables as well as the complexity of trying to integrate conventional microphones into digital workflows.

The path that made the most sense was to make an IP-networked microphone, he says. The backbone for that is already there with Dante and AES67. It allowed us to jump right into it with an IP microphone. Today, we're dealing with more channels than standard mono or stereo microphones can easily manage. Making those mics part of the network solves that. The challenge is having the controls for those things easily accessible to the engineer.

Workflow Integration

Shure's Everett Salyer: Moving into a digital world allows us to meet people where they are. We're talking about how not just workflows are changing but the workforce is changing, too. I think the reason people are more interested in digital microphones is that they more easily fit into their workflows and provide more flexibility, says Everett Salyer, specialist senior, business development, Shure. It can be also transported via Ethernet or fiber, usually through Dante network or AES67. He adds that broadcast audio has moved deeper into an IT-based workflow and these types of transducers get the capture element into it faster, more effectively, and more efficiently.

Digital microphones like the DCA901 can go where conventional mics can

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/10/28/tech-focus-digital-microphones-...
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