Networked Audio Gets Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show On-Air The broadcast audio of the hip-hop event was mixed from a control room across the street By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Wednesday, February 23, 2022 - 7:00 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
The Halftime Show at Super Bowl LVI was a moment to remember for a number of reasons, not least because it was the first time that all the headline performers - Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar - were hip-hop artists, reflecting the significant cultural and economic shift that has taken place over the past decade. But the event's audio also reflected how far remote audio mixing has come and where it might head in the future.
The broadcast audio for the halftime event was mixed from the NFL's new facility, which sits in the $5 billion, 298-acre Hollywood Park mixed-use development on the same Inglewood campus as - and literally across the road from - the Los Angeles Rams' SoFi Stadium. At the facility, five audio-control rooms are fitted with SSL S500 and S300 consoles, part of its System T broadcast range. One S500 was the main mixer for the halftime show (with an S300 in the room as backup), manned by A1 Tom Holmes.
The Pepsi Halftime Show was mixed from an Abbey Road-level control room in a nearby NFL facility.
Audio signals from the stadium were transported in the Dante format over single-mode fiber to the facility, which opened last September as an expansion of the league's production facility there. Pregame audio ( America the Beautiful, the National Anthem) was sent to NEP Super 8 game truck in the broadcast-production compound adjacent to the stadium. The Halftime Show's music mix was sent via direct-to-transmission path to NBC.
Getting Permission(s) Holmes, the longtime Grammy Awards' production mixer, was handling his second Super Bowl Halftime Show (his first time on the S500). He was impressed, even a little awed, by the league's new studio and office complex, particularly its vast 19,000-plus-I/O Dante network, which he describes as at the same time a really good thing and maybe not a really good thing.
His ambivalence has to do with the fact that a Dante network, like any other IT network, requires protocol-specific permissions for connection with external devices. For a project with as many inputs as the Super Bowl, that can be cumbersome, requiring the equivalent of a digital hall pass from the network administrator for each device, whether it's a printer in another office or a microphone preamp on a stage across the campus.
You have to query every device or patch, Holmes explains. A single patch can take literally up to 30 seconds. He points out that there were hundreds of such connections to be made over the fiber connection the Dante network rode on between the stadium and the NFL media center, using a total of 58 Focusrite RedNet interfaces, the equivalent of more than 1,700 available audio channels. (Specifically, RedNet A16R and RedNet D16R interfaces connected digital and analog sources and feeds to and from the NFL Network; RedNet D64R MADI bridges were deployed for connecting signals to and from the SSL and DiGiCo digital audio consoles in the system and for connections between production groups.)
If you want to take a patch from a new Dante box and patch it to your console, Holmes says, the console has to basically go and check with every other device on the Dante network and see who owns that patch. You have to sit there and wait for this query to be done over the entire network. You can moderate some of that lag time, but you would have to go into the SSL [operating] system and integrate all of the added physical devices as logic' devices, and then [each] patch gets a device label. This speeds up the query process by allowing the console to filter out and ignore all but the devices you want to use. But somebody needs to spend time typing each patch-point label into the system.
The permissions process and related efforts, such as implementing MADI-to-Dante conversions, were time-consuming but were mostly finalized two days before the show. Holmes credits the NFL's IT staff for making what was an extremely complex connectivity proposition manageable.
However, that complexity, along with the use of particular cameras and visual frame rates mandated by the producers, inevitably introduced a considerable amount of latency into the mix: 243.75 ms of delay, to be exact. If not corrected, that would have been enough to be very noticeable in the form of lip-synch problems. But it was corrected: by delaying all the audio except that not associated with a camera (for example, the EVS playbacks) by 243.75 ms prior to audio and video being embedded together for broadcast.
Other sources of latency, such as the difference between hard-wired and RF cameras, can delay picture by an additional several milliseconds, though usually not enough to be noticeable on screen, and are even less of an issue for quick-cut productions like music shows.
A Proper Recording Studio Previous Super Bowl Halftime Shows have been mixed on dedicated remote-production trucks, usually designed specifically for on-location music mixing and/or recording -and exceptionally good at their particular task. On more-conventional remote-production trucks, the audio is relegated to a small compartment at the rear of a trailer.
The Super Bowl LVI's halftime mix took place in essentially the equivalent of an Abbey Road-level environment, featuring a Genelec 7.1.4 monitoring system and as good as or even better than the studios the show's songs were originally recorded and mixed in. Like all first-time experiences, though, Holmes's was somewhat fraught with the exigencies of network connectivity overlaying the year's single biggest 12 minutes o
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Networked Audio Gets Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show On-Air The broadcast audio of the hip-hop event was mixed from a control room across the street By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
