World Series 2025: How Audio Is Transported Around the Sites and Beyond

World Series 2025: How Audio Is Transported Around the Sites and BeyondThe signals also move not just between two countries but around the globeBy Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Wednesday, October 29, 2025 - 11:35 am

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Game 3 in Los Angeles Monday may have been the longest World Series game in history, but the process of getting the audio signals for it around the campuses of Chavez Ravine and Rogers Stadium is equally arduous.

The big thing we're doing here is just moving a lot of audio around, understates Doug Deems, engineer in charge, comms, Major League Baseball Network (MLBN), one of several rightsholders on the Series shows.

MLBN's Doug Deems: The big thing we're doing here is just moving a lot of audio around.

It is a lot of audio, and it is moving globally. Other than for FOX, which has the U.S. broadcast rights, the truck compound is shipping sound signals for the world feed - which is available everywhere except in the U.S. and Japan - and for the international feed for rightsholders onsite: ESPN international, TVA, and Univision this year. In addition, it's a bigger compound this time, to accommodate the true international nature of this Series.

MLBN produces its studio shows via a combination of onsite production - NEP Supershooter 1 in Los Angles, NEP Alpha in Toronto - and REMI from its facility in Secaucus, NJ. The world feed operates from Game Creek Chesapeake in L.A. and Game Creek Apollo in Toronto. Rogers SportsNet has a production truck onsite rather than just taking feeds as it would in non-Blue Jays years. NHK always has a truck on location for the Series. BSI is onsite to handle commentary needs for the rightsholders, occupying a leg on the MADI network with its own internal Dante system. It's the first year that both NEP and Game Creek mobile units are on the same shows.

Formats Come TogetherJust as the World Series brings together the best of the American and National leagues, the event is a mix of leading connectivity formats, with Dante in the various trucks - islands, Deems calls them - which are connected via the MADI protocol.

It's like Dante's the LAN and MADI's the WAN, he quips, making a pun that AV nerds would appreciate. We've settled on MADI as the backbone part of it, and each island within the compound kind of has its own little Dante network.

With as many as 30 transmission paths leaving the compound, the audio-signal-path designs for the two World Series compounds are complex, complicated, and - Deems insists - cool in how they integrate various transport protocols.

Between me and [MLB audio engineer] Dan Cochran on the studio show, we built a MADI network between our trucks, FOX, and NHK, he says, crediting Cochran as the system's overall designer. There are a couple of Dante networks in play: one for world feed and a much larger one for the studio shows.

There are some awesome people involved, he continues. Dan, Jon Lukason, and Tony Johnson spearhead a tangled mess for the studio shows, like they have been doing so for 15 years or so. Bill Schnack, who has been on the last 30-something World Series shows, is mixing the world feed again. Jason Hedgecock is also here, having moved from heading up tech for MLBN to a similar but larger role with the league. They're all great people.

A fair amount of Riedel is involved here, too. Deems also oversees a largely Riedel-based comms deployment. An Artist frame onsite for the studio show runs panels locally, handles Bolero, trunks to MLBN in New Jersey over a Riedel VLAN, and ties to the RTS systems in the trucks. The design of the audio-signal-transport system follows a pattern developed over the better part of the past decade.

In that time, the system has been scaled up to meet the needs of a bigger production, which now includes more entertainment elements and more input channels. Deems points out that the Music Mix Mobile truck - which mixes the Grammy Awards broadcasts - was onsite to mix the music for the Jonas Brothers' unexpected performance during a break in the fifth inning of Game 2.

Our end of the pipeline has nothing to do with the entertainment, Deems says, not without a hint of relief. I think, once you get the connectivity down, just basically getting everything in a place where you can get a look at it is the biggest challenge for me. The Game Creek guys have been great about building me custom router panels. I can get ahold of any audio source and put it someplace else and also put it in a speaker in front of me where I can take a listen to it. It's just about coordinating between all of us, making sure it's the best show possible.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2025/10/29/world-series-2025-how-audio-is-...
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