The Super Bowl by Shawn Peacock

Shawn Peacock, Broadcast Audio Engineer A1 for over 20 years, encompassing college football, X Games, tennis and motorsports including NASCAR and SRX Racing.


I was blessed to have learned these skills on the job, taught by some of the best Audio Engineers in the business. Along this journey, I have been fortunate to be a member of excellent teams that have won five Technical Emmy Awards. Now I find myself being the one looking for opportunities to give back to the industry that has been so good to me by always looking to pass on this craft to the next generation.

“Calrec is the standard for sports broadcasting.”

If you are afforded the privilege to work on a Super Bowl, it’s a moving experience. You find yourself surrounded by the very best in our industry. Everyone you interact with has amazing stories of accomplishment: it’s a humbling experience. This year I was asked to be the Tape Release Submixer for Jamie McCombs, the Senior Audio Engineer, who assigned added EVS sources to me. 

I was on a Calrec Artemis in the Upper Compound and another Audio Engineer was in an adjacent room, also on an Artemis and he handled pre-game content. These two consoles were connected via SMPTE 2110 using a shared Calrec ImPulse Core.

This is a Calrec compound for this broadcaster. There were two Apollos and four Artemis in the loop in total. Calrec is the standard for sports broadcasting. Audio Engineers are very familiar with them as they are the consoles we sit in front of most often. The architecture is recognizable and it’s very similar across their products. This architectural familiarity is crucial.

When you’re working on a show like the Super Bowl, with that level of viewership and importance, the stakes have changed. In this environment you’re at a different level of intensity and delivery: you know you are at the Super Bowl. On other events, I try and play this down while working – it’s just TV; do your job! – but man, when you’re doing this, you know the scale.

“That’s why you want to be sat in front of a Calrec.”

With these stakes, you want to be sitting in front of the best technology. You want to be sitting in front of something you have huge familiarity with. This needs to be instantaneous so that you don’t have to think, you can get to work to satisfy the quality expectation viewers have around the world. That’s why you want to be sat in front of a Calrec.

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