NAB 2025 in Review: SVG Audio Roundtable Reflects On a Changing Industry

NAB 2025 in Review: SVG Audio Roundtable Reflects On a Changing Industry Global sports, speech intelligibility, digital microphones are on the table By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Monday, April 14, 2025 - 10:49 am

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Now a staple at major industry events, the SVG Audio Roundtable (formerly the DTV Audio Group) has evolved much like the industry it supports, becoming leaner, palpably younger, and more diverse.

SVG Audio Roundtable Chair Roger Charlesworth emphasized the changing nature of sports media, especially the shift to streaming.

Gathering at NAB 2025, a group of 25 or so attendees and presenters, led by Chair Roger Charlesworth, was about half the size of some previous events and, at two hours, about half as long. But the content was just as good, with concise and informative presentations.

The Roundtable event - sponsored by Audio-Technica, Calrec, Dale Pro Audio, Dolby, the DTV Audio Group (sponsored by SVG), Lawo, Shure, and Telos Alliance - takes place off the record, with presentations and comments mostly not attributable. But trends do emerge.

It's a Global World Out There No, Yogi Berra did not say that. But one commenter who had made the transition from a conventional sports network to a streamer, did note that sports is now a global proposition, with some events reaching far beyond what has been typical, and cited the reported 65 million viewers for the Nov. 15, 2024, Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight on Netflix.

Underscoring the increasing globalization of sports media, it was noted that WBD Sports, whose Max streaming service provided Olympics coverage to Europe, delivered 90 events in 38 languages last year. Across both Max and Discovery+, Paris 2024 drove almost 1 billion streaming minutes, more than seven times that logged at the same point of Tokyo 2020 and already representing 75% of the total minutes from those Games, the broadcaster had reported earlier. That underscores, according to the commenter, the need to address audio services for sports in a broader manner.

To accomplish that, artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technologies will have to be part of the equation. AI could, it was established, derive as many as 50 translations from a single-language commentary - in real time. At the same time, machine-learning techniques can create auto-mix capabilities for audio, necessary to support an exponential number of new descriptive-audio streams.

The entire experience, however, will have to start with the best audio quality possible, said one participant. That includes being vendor- and codec-agnostic.

In fact, the person continued, achieving that will require the sports-media industry to rely even more on its vendors and equipment/technology developers and suppliers as technologies and formats proliferate.

A lot of what needs to be done along these lines is already a reality. The complicating factor for sports at this scale, however, is that it all needs to be done live, with as little latency as possible. As a result, another commenter noted, viewers may be more willing to forgive some types of audio glitches with live event production, not letting the pursuit of perfection limit the immediacy of live.

Feeds and Stems Among the new and improved technologies for processing audio discussed was the increasingly refined capability to separate sound sources into discrete stems. The need for this is two-fold: to enhance speech intelligibility (more people, including younger ones, are enabling closed captioning as television sound becomes more dense) and, as rightsholders become more aggressive in protecting copyrights, to strip out unauthorized and unlicensed background music.

AudioShake, whose algorithms are being used to do this in postproduction, expects to be able to accomplish those stem separations in real time later this year. Salsa Sound's representative noted that their company is working to do the same for noise reduction as well to be able to eliminate distractions, such as rain noise, during sports broadcasts in real time.

Digital microphones - the Great White Whale of pro audio - are a perennial topic at these conclaves. Efforts in that direction by Audio-Technica, Shure, and Voyage Audio (whose Spatial Mic 2nd Order Ambisonics VR microphone is currently capable of single-wire digital connectivity) were cited as making progress.

The conversation did come back to the viewers and, more specifically, to their devices - all 2 billion of them, by one estimation, none of which can accommodate and decode every possible audio format. Dolby's MS12 Multistream Decoder - which can decode virtually all worldwide and certain local broadcast standards, including Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital, Extended HE-AAC with MPEG-D DRC, all AAC bitstreams (including USAC), and Dolby AC-4 - was cited as a good start for what will be a Sisyphean undertaking.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2025/04/14/nab-2025-in-review-svg-audio-ro...
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