RTÉ, Ireland’s national public-service broadcaster, rethought how it would approach mixing commentary for the 2026 World Cup soccer tournament, June 11–July 19, choosing to combine Calrec’s Type R system with its SMPTE ST 2110 network.
Prior productions would have required six commentary booths—each with its own operator on a mixer. But this year, RTÉ signals from each booth fed a single multimix area where one operator handled all feeds. For the entire tournament, a team of four operators covered 104 matches held across North America.
From an operational point of view, the biggest benefit came in the form of productivity. “I think there were four operators mixing these 104 matches; that’s pretty much the biggest win,” said Roland de Groot, media production and infrastructure manager at RTÉ.
RTÉ has relied upon Calrec, especially in television, for a long time. Since 2023, Synthax Audio, Calrec’s U.K. partner has installed Type R in seven of the broadcaster’s radio studios as part of a large-scale upgrade project.
So, when RTÉ’s TV sound operations team set out the requirements for a multimix commentary area, RTÉ and Calrec’s engineering teams collaborated closely to shape the solution.
“We’re already very familiar with the Calrec Type R for radio,” de Groot said. “When the TV Sound Ops team gave us their list of technical and operational requirements, some of the engineers in my team said: ‘Actually, I think we can cover this pretty much with a Type R, maybe 80% out of the box.’”
The architecture for the tournament mirrored the broadcaster’s radio installations, in which dual main and redundant Cores and an analog breakout box are connected to RTÉ’s ST 2110 network.
“The mixer is 2110, our commentary boxes are 2110, and our comms system is 2110,” de Groot said. “All the signals, all the sources and all the destinations are connected to our 2110 house router, and all this combined allowed us to build a very powerful, very flexible system.”
The two Calrec Cores sit in a rack room, and the quiet, passively cooled analog breakout box sits in the gallery. It also connects to the network rather than the Core itself. If the on-air Core were to develop a problem, the system fails over to the standby Core, which reconnects to the breakout box automatically in about a second. The Type R consoles connect via standard Cat6 cabling to a switch, which links them to the Cores.
“It’s effectively a data center system, which is accessed by the consoles over standard IP,” said de Groot. “It’s a rack room in the building, but technically it could be anywhere.”
