Tech Focus: Audio Training, Part 1 - A1 Shortage Remains a Major-League Challenge for Sports BroadcastingAutomation, AI are possible remedies for a shrinking labor supplyBy Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Wednesday, September 17, 2025 - 7:01 am
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Broadcast-sports audio has undergone a lot of evolutionary and revolutionary change in recent decades, from the analog-to-digital transition to the shift into the cloud. However, its biggest long-term challenge continues to be very human: where is the next generation of A1s to mix all that sound?
The A1 - the lead audio mixer on sports and other live broadcasts - is considered the apex of broadcast audio's front-line field team. But it's a position that comes with a huge amount of responsibility and pressure: mixing a live production with an audience of millions while being peppered with directions from the show's director and producer, not to mention being solely responsible for ensuring that any system failures are fixed on the fly. And that's after what might have been a three- or four-hour flight and a night in a hotel before a day that might start at dawn. That's if you don't have to build the show : oversee deployment of microphones and cabling and configure the audio console from scratch. It's a place a dwindling number of mixers want to be, or stay.
Lack of Awareness and a Skills Gap
Audinate's Vince Lepore: There's no question in my mind that [the mix process] is going to become automated and AI-driven in the next three years.
Vince Lepore, director, global training, Audinate, developer of the Dante platform, joined the world of audio-focused training after serving as course director/director, event technical operations, Full Sail University for 18 years. In the three years since then, he has observed the narrowing of the pipeline that feeds broadcast sports' sound management.
Especially when I was wrapping up my time at Full Sail, he says, we were actively talking with people about it as a problem, and we had brought in [working] A1s to talk to students and tell them about the industry, to cultivate people because there's a shortage of talent.
He attributes that, for one thing, to continued low awareness of the role in the larger pro-audio community. In addition, increasingly complex changes in broadcast-audio technology are creating what he characterizes as a skills gap as AV and IT quickly converge. And broadcasters that rely on A1s fail to encourage them as a resource. Then, too, there's the fact that it's simply not an easy profession, involving constant travel and heavy responsibilities - A1s are often the sole audio person in a remote truck's crew - for what can often be a seasonally sensitive line of work, one that pays a daily rate and doesn't offer typical employment benefits.
The people that I know that work in broadcast at a high level miss every holiday, every birthday, he laments. In the age of remote work and REMI, to be on the road 300 days a year is not as desirable for people.
Lepore, who is overseeing the updating of Audinate's own training program, can envision a time when the A1 position is increasingly given over to automation. However, he cautions, that evolution will likely be a bottom-up process, with second- and third-tier sports productions evolving earlier than the major networks.
That is because, for broadcasters, it's going to be a risky move, he explains. I've seen the same thing with the cloud. There are inherent risks in making such a huge transition, and I don't think people are going to be willing to put tier-one sporting events on-air without its being tried and tested on lower-tier events first.
All of which puts the situation back to square one: not enough qualified new hires are coming into the A1 ranks to compensate for the natural age-based attrition thinning their numbers at a time when the technology is demanding more from them.
I don't think there's one driving force here, he says. I think there's a systemic problem.
Can We Automate a Solution?As the COVID pandemic drove remote-production innovations, it also spurred development of automated options for mixing live broadcast audio. UK-based Salsa Sound, for example, contends that systems like its MIXaIR will handle at least submix duties for broadcasts and are capable of doing the main mix as well. At a time of significant financial flux in the broadcast sector and given the key role sports rights play, broadcasters are looking at some automated solutions to help mitigate personnel and logistics costs.
At this point, few automated mixing solutions have been regularly applied for sports broadcasts in the U.S.; uptake is slowed by potential labor concerns (many A1s are members of IATSE or NABET) and by the fact that broadcasters tend to be risk-averse when it comes to implementing new technologies - particularly around sports, usually the most expensive single content element on their budgets. However, the rapid rise of AI in the past two years may considerably accelerate that.
Program Productions Inc. (PPI), which provides staffing/crew solutions for broadcasters, including sports specialist ESPN, has been tracking the thinning ranks for A1s for years. Not surprisingly, as a personnel-resource and training supplier, PPI's perspective is heavily tilted toward human hands on console faders.
PPI's Kelly Hammonds: We're trying to make sure we're hitting all the resources that are available to us [to fille the A1 pipeline].
I would not say that we have seen a lot of automation replacing our technicians, says Kelly Hammonds, director, people operations, PPI. In fact, I would say I haven't seen that at all. Are we looking for more people? Yes. Is there a gap that
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Tech Focus: Audio Training, Part 1 - A1 Shortage Remains a Major-League Challenge for Sports BroadcastingAutomation, AI are possible remedies for a shrinking labor supplyBy Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
