RTÉ Mixes 2026 World Football Championship Commentary

RTÉ combined Calrec's Type R system with its SMPTE ST 2110 network to rethink how it mixed commentary for the 2026 World Football Championship. Where six commentary booths once needed an operator on each mixer, the signals from every booth fed a single multi-mix area where one sound operator handled them all, with a team of four covering the tournament's 104 matches.

Calrec has long played an important role at RTÉ, especially in television, and since 2023, Synthax Audio, Calrec's UK 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 multi-mix 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," says Roland de Groot, Media Production and Infrastructure Manager at RTÉ. "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 per cent out of the box.'"

The team built a development and test system using a Type R IP Core, a couple of panels, and Calrec Assist browser-based interface. "Once we started building this actual environment, we quickly realised that yes, we can make this happen, we can make this work," he says. The result was six 6-fader panels, one per commentary position, with a second layer on each controlling the aux buses and outputs, alongside six Large Soft Panel touchscreens.

The architecture mirrors RTÉ's radio installations, with dual main and redundant Cores and an analogue breakout box, all connected to the broadcaster's SMPTE ST 2110 network. "The mixer is 2110, our commentary boxes are 2110, and our comms system is 2110," says de Groot. "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 are positioned in a rack room in the building, and the analogue breakout box sits in the gallery. Because the breakout box is quiet and passively cooled, noise isn't an issue. It also sits on the network rather than on the Core itself, so if the on-air Core develops a problem, the system fails over to the standby Core, which reconnects to the breakout box automatically within about a second. The Type R consoles connect over standard Cat6 cabling to a switch, which links them back to the Cores. "It's effectively a data centre system, which is accessed by the consoles over standard IP," says de Groot. "It's a rack room in the building, but technically it could be anywhere."

RTÉ involved its first-line support and central apparatus room (CAR) teams, together with partners from the outset, so knowledge of the system was spread well beyond the build team. On the operational side, the biggest gain came in productivity. "I think there were four operators mixing these 104 matches; that's pretty much the biggest win," says de Groot.

"This project highlights the value of flexible technology in the hands of experienced engineers," says Henry Goodman, Director of Product Management at Calrec. "RTÉ identified an opportunity to extend the use of a product they already knew, developing a solution that met their requirements while making the most of existing expertise and infrastructure. It's a great example of innovation driven by operational knowledge and RTÉ has shown just how far it can go."

calrec.com/