Sports Audio Summit 2024: Immersive sound and inclusivity discussions top the bill at bustling London event By Kevin Emmott
Monday, November 25, 2024 - 17:03
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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 Mi
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Sports Audio Summit 2024: Immersive sound and inclusivity discussions top the bill at bustling London event By Kevin Emmott 
