By Dan Daley
SVG Audio Editor

NBC Olympics has added five Calrec Omega with Bluefin consoles as part of its coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. The 56-fader consoles will provide audio mixing for a number of events across several venues. Two consoles will provide audio coverage for both the opening and closing ceremonies and the athletics. Two other consoles will be used for gymnastics and trampoline, and a fifth will be used for beach volleyball. “We will have some very large scale venues like ceremonies, track and field, and gymnastics,” says Bob Dixon, NBC Olympics' director of sound design and communications.

Dixon also notes that this is the first Olympics broadcast to be produced totally in high-definition with discrete 5.1 audio. “We are still in a period of transition in the United States, so most of our audience will still watch the games on standard-definition television receivers with two channels of audio,” he explains. “This means that everything we do in China must serve both [modes of broadcast resolution].”

NBC Olympics will send six discrete channels of audio with HD pictures to the U.S. from each venue, but will also send a simultaneous two-channel program downmix, as well as a stereo downmix of the sound effects that are used in promos and post-produced pieces.

“We will also be paying the greatest attention to the down-mix of those channels for our stereo-listening audience,” he says.

A Miranda Technologies XVP 811 cross converter card that will convert the HD signal to standard def will actually do the downmix. That two-mix is sent to 30 Rock and the Broadcast Center audio mixers can confidence-monitor that from a network feed from WNBC. Additionally, a number of Dixon’s friends in the U.S. will be checking the stereo mix and providing him with comments via email. “And we check the AV Forum,” he says. “That’s the place to find the complaints.”

The mixers have some control over the automated dowmix. Using metadata, the mix can respond to dynamic changes. “If the surround mix gets hotter in the rear channels, we can [program] it to attenuate those in the stereo mix so they don’t interfere with the announcers,” Dixon explains.

The Omega with Bluefin console provides 160 channel processing paths packaged as 48 stereo and 64 mono channels, allowing up to 24X full 5.1 surround channels. NBC Olympics mixers are able to address all six channels at once, or divide them up to provide independent control of each channel, with full EQ and dynamics on all channel groups and main outputs.

NBC, owns the exclusive U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games through 2012, which includes Beijing in 2008, Vancouver in 2010, and London in 2012, will broadcast a record-breaking 3,600 hours of coverage from August 8 to 24, about three times as much as the 1,210 hours of Olympic coverage from Athens in 2004. That’s a lot of sound.