Calrec touchdown in Arizona for a stellar Super Bowl LVII performance

This year’s Super Bowl drew a massive audience of over 113 million viewers during the game and more than 118 million viewers for Rihanna’s outstanding half-time performance. Fox Sports celebrated their 10-year anniversary of broadcasting the event, making it a significant milestone for the network.

Shawn Peacock, highly experienced Broadcast Audio Engineer A1, with over 20 years of experience covering a range of high-profile sports was part of the team delivering the Super Bowl coverage, with the help of Calrec consoles.

If you are afforded the privilege to work on a Super Bowl, it’s a moving experience, said Shawn. 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.

“Calrec is the standard for sports broadcasting”

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. 

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. 

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