Talking to Karl Malone, senior director of audio engineering at NBC Sports and Olympics, about the sound he intends to capture and deliver during the Winter Games in Milan-Cortina reveals a passion and excitement for the event he hopes viewers will sense at home.

A critical part of making that happen will be the extensive use of immersive microphones to take advantage not only of the five speakers and subwoofer of a 5.1 surround mix, but also of four height channels dedicated to picking up mics elevated to capture a fuller soundscape and immerse the audience in the moment.

“It’s usually quite cold and potentially not too windy up there [in the starting hut of downhill skiing], but it’s isolated, and I think immersive mics are really going to give us that feeling of isolation,” said Malone, offering an example of how channel-based immersive audio will benefit the coverage of one event.

“How we mix these normally, you’ll never hear any crowd in the mix because it’s all about the athletes and their time and the focus on them, the zoom in on the eyes and listening to the audio,” he said. “You see the breath, and you hear the breath. Then, as they go down the hill and they’re vying for a world record, you start to bring in the crowd and immersive.”

Dolby Atmos and Audinate Dante
Delivering immersive audio leveraging 10 channels of Dolby Atmos audio will be a major priority for the network during the Games. “We have large 8.0—basically four height and four sort of lower-level—arrays that we will use for the general ambience at pretty much all venues just to get that larger immersive crowd sound whether indoors or outdoors,” Malone said.

“Then we have some smaller immersive mics as well, which are Dante-based,” he continued. “That’s a huge advancement in being able to get immersive audio into tighter spaces and also being able to do it on a single Ethernet cable, which is wonderful.”

Using Dante enables the A1s mixing coverage at the NBC Sports hub in Stamford, Conn., to control mics strategically positioned around venues in Milan-Cortina. Accessing the mics through a remote desktop, the A1s can not only operate them, but also steer pickup in real time, as necessary, from 4,000 miles away.

“One of our hopes is to get these types of mics into the starting houses of the downhill races where the venue is smaller,” he said, specifically identifying how he hopes sound will convey “the pressure and the tension of being very high and very alone on the top of a mountain.”

“You can feel it, and you have to be able to hear that, too,” Malone said.

Meanwhile Back in Stamford
NBC will use 14 control rooms in Stamford, four of which can be considered primary control rooms, he said. One will be used for primetime, a second for daytime coverage, a third for USA Network and a fourth for NBC’s “Gold Zone,” its whip-around streaming coverage on Peacock, presenting the most exciting action from various venues. Each primary control room will handle 5.1.4 immersive mixes.

The remaining control rooms in Stamford are what the network refers to as “venue control rooms,” used to mix audio for ice hockey, cross-country skiing, speed skating, Alpine sliding, aerials and moguls, as well as at the Olympics Snow Park, where freestyle skiing and snowboarding will take place.

“Those control rooms act like trucks, feeding into a master audio control room where they’ll take the eight channels of immersive height information and mix that down into four,” Malone said. “So, it’s a finished product in 5.1.4.”

For this year’s Games, the network is giving its editors in Stamford the ability to edit 16 channels, not simply 5.1 surround. “Ultimately, you want those 16 channels to go back into a control room so that the A1 can play it back as live and have access to those eight channels of height microphones to be able to mix down into four channels,” Malone said.

“We championed the ability to maintain that whole 16-channel workflow through the building—from the venue all the way through edits and then back to a live control room,” he said. “That’s pretty important.”

There will be two exceptions to this remote integration model (REMI) workflow, however: the opening ceremony and figure skating.

U.S. viewers and the network regard figure skating as a “top-tier sport,” Malone said, and as such, NBC wants to have more production personnel on site.

“They [NBC Olympics reporters and talent] have more access to athletes,” he said. “It’s a bigger production with more cameras and more NBC cameras. There are more NBC microphones. It’s just bigger.”

The same is true of the opening ceremony, so both will be produced from an on-site mobile unit.

Distribution to Various Platforms
Audio from Stamford will be handed off as discrete 5.1.4 PCM to be encoded to Dolby Atmos and delivered to Comcast, Peacock, multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) partners and the network itself. At that point, the network will remove the height channels for distribution to affiliates. “All of the NBC O&Os will get AC-4 [the codec used by Dolby Atmos and integral to ATSC 3.0],” Malone said.

“What we did for Paris [2024 Summer Olympics] is they [the owned-and-operated stations] took our network 1080i and up-res-ed it to 1080p HDR with Dolby Vision and Atmos for NextGen [TV],” Malone said, adding that some affiliates transmitting NextGen TV will do the same this time.

“The AC-4 pipe has already been laid out to NBC O&Os,” he said. “It’s really testing the pipe at this stage, and we’ve done very successful AC-4 tests with both immersive AD [audio description]—being able to take audio description and present that in a 5.1.4 presentation.”

To ensure its 5.1.4 immersive audio presentation is available to Peacock subscribers, the streaming service has conducted extensive testing of home devices, such as Roku boxes, Amazon Fire TV Sticks and others, to ensure glitch-free decoding and presentation, Malone said.

“That’s why it took a long time in my mind for Peacock to go immersive,” he said. “It’s because there are the creatives, including me, saying: ‘We’re ready to do this creatively. We can give you 5.1.4.’ But Peacock had to test every single device. They aren’t going to launch without making sure everything is right.”

Planning for the 2026 Winter Games started right after the Summer Olympics, with the goal of one-upping NBC’s award-winning coverage of the Paris Games.

“You don’t sit on your laurels,” Malone said. “You think: ‘What can we do better? How can we engage the audience more? How can we tell the story our directors and producers want to tell?’”

For the Milan-Cortina Games, when it comes to audio, the answer is clearly immersive.

NBC Sports is celebrating what it calls “Legendary February,” hosting three marquee sporting events expected to attract record viewership. The action begins with the opening ceremony from Milan, Italy, when the XXV Winter Olympic Games commence on Feb. 6. Two days later, the network will air the Super Bowl and, a week later, the NBA All-Star Game.

Planning for such a confluence of events isn’t easy, but NBC Sports has plenty of experience in handling crowded programming schedules, particularly when it comes to the Olympics, which it has televised for nearly 30 consecutive years.

Record Number of Hours Expected
The 2026 Winter Olympics, officially “Milano Cortina 2026,” will take place in the cities of Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Feb. 6-22, and feature about 2,900 athletes across 16 sports. NBC promises more than 3,000 hours of coverage across all of its platforms (including NBC, USA Network, CNBC, Peacock, NBCOlympics.com, and the NBC Sports app), with nearly 200 hours of coverage on NBC alone.

Darryl Jefferson, senior vice president of engineering and technology for NBC Olympics and Sports, will oversee broadcast operations to ensure the most comprehensive coverage of what the International Olympic Committee said is “the most geographically widespread Winter Olympics in history,” spanning an area of more than 22,000 square kilometers (over 8,500 square miles).

Although this is the first Winter Games with Jefferson at the helm—he succeeds Dave Mazza, who retired in 2023—Jefferson is a longtime veteran of NBC Olympics, joining in 2008 as director of postproduction.

And while the team had nearly two years between the Paris Games and the 2026 event, that was not the case for the last Winter Games in Beijing in 2022, when NBC Olympics had only about a six-month window between the pandemic-delayed 2020 Tokyo Summer Games, held in the fall of 2021, and Beijing.

Geographic Sprawl
The biggest challenge for Milan-Cortina 2026 is the aforementioned geographic sprawl, Jefferson said. For example, the distance from the Olympic hub in Milan to the competition venues is measured in multiple hours, with the skating venue approximately five and a half hours away and the men’s and women’s alpine skiing venues three hours apart.

With most of the country’s municipalities opting to use existing facilities instead of constructing new purpose-built operations for the 16-day event, locations are not always optimal.

“That’s one of the reasons why all of our venues are so geographically spread out,” he said. “They’re well-established and beautiful, but they are further apart than we’ve ever seen before, so we had to build a plan that looked at very geographically disparate venues.

“In so many Olympic cities of the past, you’d go into the Olympic hub and you’d have a number of venues that are clustered together,” he added. “Here, a lot of the venues are far apart, so we had to rethink deployment of people and gear. We’ve come up with a very good plan for doing all of those things, but we honestly had to throw out the old book.”

Nevertheless, it’s not like this is abnormal for a world-class event. “It is spread out, but that’s the Olympics for you,” Jefferson added.

With such a dispersed physical layout, particularly in rural areas, moving personnel and gear to venues is paramount, Jefferson said. The NBC team learned a lot while producing live coverage of sporting events during a pandemic, he said, with much of the coverage originating from the NBC facilities in Stamford, Conn.

“We learned a lot of valuable lessons with the ‘COVID Olympics’ in Tokyo and Beijing in that we still had a good deal of production on site in Tokyo—we had the primetime show and the control rooms in the IBC [International Broadcast Center] in Tokyo and Beijing; all of those things ended up coming home,” Jefferson said. “So a lot of those ‘lessons learned’ were about, ‘What can we do to maintain the high level of production value doing it from Stamford?’ And then, when COVID lifted, we tried to strike the balance of the teams that were on-site for Paris and the might of having a big broadcast facility in Stamford and pushing it to its limits.”

Staying Connected
NBCUniversal hadn’t finalized its format plans for the two weeks of the Games by presstime, however with Sunday Feb. 8 being part of “Legendary February,” the network is presenting the Super Bowl as well as the Games live all day in 4K HDR on NBC and Peacock­—17 hours of 4K HDR coverage in all. This marks the first time the Olympics and Super Bowl are being presented in 4K HDR on NBC and Peacock, according to the network.

Jefferson noted NBCUniversal’s commitment to capturing all the action in the highest available quality for any platform.

“Like in Games past, and particularly like in Paris, we will capture and produce everything everywhere in 1080p/HDR, and we’ll have deliverables for a number of platforms, both linear and Peacock [NBCU’s streaming service] in 4K HDR as well,” he said. “We’re fairly committed to HDR and 4K deliverables.”

These data-hungry formats require ever-more-increasing bandwidth between the Olympic host city and Stamford.

“In Paris, we had four 100-gig circuits and two 10-gig circuits for ancillary data and we will have the same for Milan-Cortina,” Jefferson said. “The difference between the Summer and Winter Games is that the Summer Games have so many more concurrent sports, but from a technology and connectivity perspective, we won’t take a step backwards. The connectivity we’ll use for Milan-Cortina will echo what we used in Paris, which is kind of almost unfathomable, because there’s so many fewer sports.”

And, as in years past, NBC Olympics will work as a mostly SMPTE-2110 IP-based operation, according to Jefferson. “We still have some bits and pieces that are SDI, but we’re getting our primary feed from Olympic Broadcasting Service at the International Broadcast Center in 2110,” he said. “The core technology in the Stamford facility is 2110—that’s our preferred method of exchange, but you still get outliers out there that are SDI in nature, and we appreciate them as well.”

Stamford is playing an ever-increasing role in coverage, Jefferson added.

“All but one venue is being largely produced in Stamford for this Winter Games, which is a sea change,” he said. “Figure skating production will be wholly produced on-site, with the production team facilities on-site. Every other venue is a split production.”

Using Data to Tell a Story
Since winter sports are not as popular in the United States as in other areas of the world, Jefferson said NBC Olympics will use more data to enlighten viewers on the intricacies of sports they usually see only once every four years.

“Using technology to describe through data use and visualization is really cool, because it gives people the awe-inspiring things that we see athletes do,” he said. “So we’re using data in a lot of ways to present things like rotational velocity or height, the types of things to get people to really understand, like, ‘Holy crap, that’s really remarkable!’

“One of our biggest partners is the OBS partner, Omega [the official Olympics timekeeper], but we have a bunch of other partnerships looking at computer vision analysis, relative speed, jump height, this type of thing, to explain better, and some of those things are internal to help our commentators explain,” he continued. “So we get to tell the story a bit better.”

The content-creator community will also play an important role in Olympics coverage, with increased mobile device use, Jefferson added. “In Paris, OBS used a fleet of mobile phones to cover the athlete experience on the boats coming into and up the Seine [during the opening ceremony],” he said. “I think it will be a similar offering this go, in addition to all the broadcast cameras. There’s a multiplier effect with all those mobile devices in and around the fields of play, behind the scenes and so on.”

Jefferson said he’s excited about NBC’s ability to give viewers a better understanding of the history of the host country, whether it’s in San Siro Stadium, where the opening ceremony will be staged, or at a remote sports venue.

“There are two very different Italys being presented—you have a very metropolitan city with the vision of the Duomo [cathedral] in the city center and all that goes with the fashion and the architecture and all that stuff in Milan,” he said. “And then, on the other hand, you have the unbelievably gorgeous Dolomites backing these small, quaint ski towns.

“And that dichotomy will be presented not just at the opening ceremony, but throughout the whole Games,” he added. “So it will be amazing to present those two Italys to the United States.”

The fidelity and quality of live programing has certainly improved over the last couple of decades; however, inconsistencies exist between events and broadcasters.

Through the efforts of many sound designers and mixers, sonically boring sports such as baseball and football have been transformed into consistent aural master pieces. Fox Sports audio mixer Fred Aldous changed the sound of football with the application of wireless microphones on the players, which is only growing in scope and popularity.

My proposal for wireless microphones in the bases at the 1996 Summer Olympics was shut down by the Cuban delegation fearing that the athletes could communicate to the outside world through my base microphone. Enough cannot be said about Joe Carpenter, audio engineer at Fox Sports, and his impact on baseball sound. He has put wireless microphones in all the bases plus on the homeplate umpire for years.

Soccer Coming Up Short
There’s no doubt that the power of persuasion from John Madden and the Fox production staff swayed the powers at the National Football League to recognize that this is what the public and viewers want. Clearly gaming sound, particularly on John Madden’s Football video game opened the ears of the consumer who began to ask, “Why can’t I hear that on TV?” Well, you can.

Wireless microphones on just about everybody now has piqued viewers’ interest and increased viewership for the struggling United Football League (UFL).

I commented in a previous article that I thought sound coverage of the FIFA World Cup had evolved to the best ever. This was basically accomplished with super-fast computing and some very clever algorithms assisting the mix. However, recently I watched/listened to the international production of UEFA Champions League football (soccer) finals between Dortmund and Real Madrid, and to politely state—it sounded very average and boring. I don’t understand­—virtually every sport has upped the game with pictures and sound except soccer.

Basic audio-follow-video was absent, when on multiple occasions I saw handheld cameras with no “close perspective” sound. Basic audio-follow-video is nothing new and was used as far back as 40 years ago where certain microphones, such as microphones on handheld cameras, were controlled by the switching of the camera. Audio-follow-video — basic sound for football/soccer has to include all corner kicks—no exception. Once again, the microphone is only a few feet from the corner and a basic camera switch would never miss a corner kick sound.

We are beyond the basics and once upon a time, sonically deficient audio coverage in sports was acceptable, but not anymore.

Some Immediate Improvements
I have expressed my opinion about AI and super computers completely taking over a live news or sports production. I still have faith in my prophecy but believe there are some immediate improvements that can be achieved with audio and the general production with AI supercomputing.

For example, Lawo’s HOME app platform with its use in the Rugby World Cup, has proven itself able to control the natural field effects. But one level further is available where you can automate the effects portion of the mix with subtle augmentation of field sounds. This powerful and disruptive technology has been developed by the English company SalsaSound and their MixAiR technology. AI can not only execute simple intelligent audio follow, but it can easily improve speech intelligibility through filtering and sampling.

With the 2024 Summer Olympics coming up, I would expect the sound to be significantly better than the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics just because the spectators are back. But with immersive sound it is easy to bury the sports effect with too much atmosphere and ambiance. My hope is that they are advancing their microphone coverage using some innovative sound technique like I have outlined in my book “Immersive Sound Production, a Practical Guide.”

High-quality audio production has trickled down from the production of large events like the Olympics, National Football League and Major League Baseball to where quality production of audio and video is common at all events, from bowling to darts. Take a listen to ESPN’s college softball coverage.

Cinematic sound is not hard—just hard work. Grow with the technology. There is an abundance of affordable sound enhancements that, with digital mixing consoles and audio plug-ins, can help dial in and create your sound. Learn. Last year I went to a Mix Magazine-sponsored event in Nashville about immersive sound and there were more than 100 people who were interested in immersive sound for music production as well as broadcast. The next generation of sound designers must diversify their skills, be persistent and be open minded about how to best entertain their audience.

Dennis Baxter has contributed to hundreds of live events including sound design for nine Olympic Games. He has earned multiple Emmy Awards and is the author of “A Practical Guide to Television Sound Engineering” and “Immersive Sound Production – A Practical Guide on Focal Press.”

He can be reached at dbaxter@dennisbaxtersound.com or at dennisbaxtersound.com

STAMFORD, Conn.—Molly Solomon will now carry the torch and lead NBC Olympics’ coverage, as NBC Sports Group has named her the executive producer and president of NBC Olympics Production. She will also continue to serve as the executive producer for the Golf Channel.

Solomon has worked at NBC Sports for three decades, which has included working on 10 Olympics, including being the coordinating producer of the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony and primetime show. She has been with the Golf Channel since 2012.

In her new role for NBC’s Olympics coverage, Solomon will be tasked with overseeing all day-to-day editorial production for the Games, as well as Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA. She will report to Pete Bevacqua, president of NBC Sports Group.

“As a broadcast partner at the PGA of America, and now as a colleague at NBC Sports, I’ve had a front-row seat watching Molly skillfully and creatively lead a tremendous GOLF Channel production team,” said Bevacqua. “We are excited to put oversight of our Olympic presentation into her exceptionally-qualified hands, and are especially proud to see a long-time and well-liked member of our NBC team return to her roots.”

“I can’t wait to dig in and work more broadly on the Tokyo Olympics, which will be the biggest media event in the world,” said Solomon.

The Tokyo Olympics will take place in the summer of 2020.

Solomon will now be based at NBC Sports Group’s International Broadcast Center in Stamford, Conn.