Live From Tokyo Olympics: Karl Malone on the Move to Immersive Audio and Keeping Remote Commentators Connected By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Sunday, August 1, 2021 - 6:38 pm
Print This Story
Karl Malone, NBC Sports and NBC Olympics, director, sound design, says the 2020 Olympics is truly the audio Olympics. He jokes that he says that every Olympics, but it's hard to argue with that this time around: next-generation immersive audio, with 5.1.4 (think regular surround sound with four additional channels overhead to give height to the audio), is the norm at every venue. And remote commentary is more important than ever. Simply put, the efforts are impressive. He spoke with SVG in the NBC Olympics listening room at the Tokyo IBC.
I wanted to start with your sense of the sonic landscape of these Games. Does anything stand out to you?
Going into this, the focus was a lack of crowd and how things would sound, as well as coming in with the newer technologies of immersive audio, along with OBS providing 5.1.4 audio and a paintbrush to do all our venues in immersive audio. But the lack of crowd has tended not to be an issue because we've had quite a lot of crowds, especially in swimming and gymnastics, where the other teams come in, and that has been great. That's not to say that there are no empty-sounding venues, like badminton or weightlifting, but, certainly for the primary venues, it. has become sort of a non-issue.
Michael DiCrescenzo in the Olympics audio-control room at the IBC. Notice the trusses installed to fly the four speakers.
Michael DiCrescenzo, NBC senior A1 and audio design engineer, has been mixing the NBC Primetime show in Dolby Atmos and creating the immersive mixes to ensure consistency from sport to sport. Peter Puglisi has been mixing NBC golf coverage in Dolby Atmos but out of a truck in Stamford, CT. The technical complexity of this Games has been dizzying.
Sonically, it has been kind of the best of both worlds, where you have crowd and you can pick out the detail of the sport. This was always going to be the Games that was an audio Games, and you're going to hear these Games like you've never heard before. We can hear footfalls in athletics, and that's not in a silent stadium: there is the PA, and there are people cheering. Everything takes a day or two to tweak, but you're hearing things that you've never heard before, and that has been fantastic.
Athletics, golf, gymnastics, basketball, volleyball mixed from Sky in London and swimming and beach volleyball have all sounded fantastic. The specialty cameras have helped a lot. There's a cable cam that goes over the swimming, and that really helps to pick up the sound, the wet sound of swimming.
Micheal DiCrescenzo (background) and NBC Olympics A1 Fred Hedemark at the IBC
I loved the skateboarding where you could hear the board riding down the rail.
Yeah, skateboard is good, but we're sort of challenged a little bit by a couple of sports like BMX. The ramps are soft, and the rubber wheels are soft, so you're trying to reach for those sorts of sounds. In 3 3 basketball, the court is different from regular basketball courts, where you hear squeaks and ball bounces, so you need to try to pull those [sounds] out as well. With those new sports, you want to promote that sport to people audibly as well as visually.
It has been challenging, but that's the fun part: how can we get more out of this sport and bring it home to tell the story?
Any tips for someone who has not worked in immersive audio about what to expect and how to do it?
We've always talked about having a base layer of ambience for the heights. I think that has always been very successful with us, and that's what OBS has provided us with: a nice base layer to build on.
We've gone 16 channels wide with our edits and audio coming from the truck, and we came into this knowing that's our plan. Sixteen channels of audio gave us the first eight channels for our standard 5.1, plus we do dummy headsets and clean announcer tracks to help edits. The last eight channels are fully immersive: we take the four height channels, and we have a stereo mix for the last two pairs, which we've been able to place into certain areas of the stadiums to add to that base.
For example, we would use those pairs to isolate a certain section of fans in the crowd and put that into the heights with the base. That hasn't been borne out at these Olympics, but, technically and engineering-wise, we're getting that through the edits, and that has been very successful. Making that 16-channel workflow work and getting editors to edit across 16 channels is something we've never done before. And that has been very helpful to us.
That may be how everybody else will do it, but, for us, it is having the base layer and then building on that base layer by being able to add certain things to bring your ear up.
When someone is editing with 16 channels, are they hearing the height signals?
No, they are not hearing them in an immersive overhead configuration but rather as isolated tracks, which they can solo and QC. Ultimately, they're passing them through from the trucks or the venues. The editors are doing their normal 5.1, and everything's mixed live in the audio-control room for the final mix.
Final question on the immersive land. What does it mean to see spatial audio getting its due, even seeing commercials on TV from Apple about it?
I think anything that can add to the experiences is going to be worthwhile. I know I say this all the time, but immersive audio does make the picture look better. If you add spatial audio and the immersive audio to our production, it makes the production overall a much better and more enjoyable production. And it's not that the pictures don't look grea
Most recent headlines
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
KPop Demon Hunters Stars Visit Berklee for Weeklong Celebration Andrew Choi and EJAE, who voiced the film's main characters and contributed to its soundtr...
17/12/2025
With the new season of Dancing with the Stars shimmering in the not-too-distant future this New Year, the celebrity and dancer pairings of the twelve couples ha...
16/12/2025
Hawkins has landed on Spotify, just in time for Stranger Things Season 5, Volume...
16/12/2025
Wherever you are, your favorite music and audio content should go seamlessly with you. That's why Spotify has partnered with NAVER Corp, Korea's leading...
16/12/2025
2025 Wrapped arrived bigger and bolder than ever. This year's experience is designed to be ultra personal and shareable, with new features like Wrapped Part...
16/12/2025
Three 12-kilowatt Advanced Electric Propulsion System thrusters, supplied by L3Harris Technologies, form the core of Gateway's propulsion system. Pictured i...
16/12/2025
The challenge facing America's defense industrial base is not just about speed - its about rebuilding the foundation that makes speed possible. Our nations ...
16/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
16/12/2025
SEVILLE, Spain Canal Sur, the public broadcasting service for Andalusia, Spain, has completed a total technology refresh based on Pebble's resilient, softwa...
16/12/2025
NEW YORK Teleprompting hardware provider Telescript International has acquired all software code and intellectual property previously owned by Telescript West. ...
16/12/2025
As cable operators face increased competition from 5G fixed wireless access providers, a new report from Ookla Research finds that T-Mobile is the FWA speed lea...
16/12/2025
Apple has announced a major upgrade to the Apple TV app for device owners outside the Apple ecosystem with news that the Apple TV app for Android now supports G...
16/12/2025
Space42 grows Direct-to-Device partner ecosystem through a Memorandum of Underst...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON Announces Release Date for Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 R...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON's Kyivstar Invests in Renewable Energy in Ukraine with Acq...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Emma Appleton, Fares Fares, Frida Gustavsson and Jakob Oftebro...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Docu-reality My Korean Boyfriend Gets a Trailer and Premiere D...
16/12/2025
Harmonic's XOS Advanced Media Processor Improves Streaming Video Quality and Boosts Viewer Engagement SAN JOSE, Calif. - Dec. 16, 2025 - Harmonic (NASDAQ: ...
16/12/2025
RT Sport Awards 2025 live on RT One and RT Player at 8:05pm on Saturday 20 December.
On Saturday 20 December live on RT One and RT Player at the earlier t...
16/12/2025
Singer -songwriter Brian Kennedy has been announced as the final celebrity dance...
15/12/2025
Harlem Globetrotters Celebrate 100th Anniversary With New Brand Campaign From Th...
15/12/2025
Top L-R: La Tierra Del Valor (The Home of the Brave), Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawe...
15/12/2025
L3Harris will leverage 15 years of experience supporting the E-4B Nightwatch and...
15/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the loss of federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and operational changes, the statewide pub...
15/12/2025
BOULDER, Colo. Public Media Venture Group (PMVG), Venture Technologies Group (VTG), and WQED have completed a multipart agreement that they say will significant...
15/12/2025
Cape Town, November 13, 2025 - SES and International artist and humanitarian, Fo...
15/12/2025
Luxembourg, December 15, 2025 - SES, a leading space solutions company, and Abra Group launched fast and reliable multi-orbit inflight connectivity service on t...
15/12/2025
How Rivian s Design Puts Drivers First-And Why That Matters Published on Dec 15, 2025 Categories: Business Solutions
LinkedIn Corporate Communications
Sha...
15/12/2025
Space42 and Cobham Satcom completed the full range of advanced terminals for the...
15/12/2025
15 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan Delivers First Starlink Direct to Cel...
15/12/2025
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor finds himself the topic of year's cracker jokes
Oasis, David Harbour, Celebrity Traitors and Angela Rayner all feature in this y...
15/12/2025
Comscore Expands Cross-Platform Campaign Measurement to Include Audio and Social New capabilities strengthen cross-platform campaign reporting suite; CCR rebran...
15/12/2025
NVIDIA today announced it has acquired SchedMD - the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) ...
15/12/2025
RT .ie has reached one billion page views this year and is on track to finish 2025 2% ahead of last year. Average time spent on the site is up 3% on 2024, with ...
15/12/2025
Modern workflows showcase the endless possibilities of generative and agentic AI on PCs.
Of many, some examples include tuning a chatbot to handle product-supp...
13/12/2025
Powering Client Growth: Horizon Deepens Nielsen Partnership, Enabling More Effic...
13/12/2025
In a move that will help it offer more flexible and less costly programming options, YouTube TV has announced that it will be launching YouTube TV Plans with mo...
13/12/2025
SINGAPORE Magna Systems has designed, built and completed what is believed to be the first full UHD and IP-based OB truck in Southeast Asia for a Singapore medi...
12/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Everything You Need to Know for Next Week's Big Sho...
12/12/2025
Hailey Gates at the Atropia premiere (photo by George Pimentel / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)...
12/12/2025
Last month, Spotify announced a new collaboration with the ATP Tour, the global governing body of men's professional tennis, aimed at bringing the next gene...
Live From Tokyo Olympics: Karl Malone on the Move to Immersive Audio and Keeping Remote Commentators Connected By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
