Bob Dixon, director of sound design and communications for NBC’s productions of the Olympics broadcasts for more than 30 years, died Nov. 16. He was 70 years old.
Although he never considered himself a huge sports fan, Dixon nonetheless changed the way the world hears sports on television. Part of the first network group dedicated to Olympics production at NBC for the 1996 Atlanta Games and having worked on Olympics broadcasts since the 1984 Los Angeles Games, he guided the evolution of Olympics broadcast sound from mono to stereo (for the 1988 Seoul Summer Games) to discrete 5.1 surround (2008 Beijing Games).
In 1996, NBC secured its first long-term contract to broadcast the Olympics, which prompted creation of the NBC Olympics group. Dixon ended a long freelance career that had begun in 1979 — including remote work for ESPN, ABC, HBO, CBS, Fox, and Canadian networks CBC and TSN, mixing and designing audio for football, baseball, hockey, tennis, and boxing — when he took on the full-time position of manager of sound design for NBC Olympics in 1998. He retired from NBC after the 2012 London Games.
In that time, Dixon set new standards for broadcast audio. He helped guide the first use of matrixed 5.1 surround sound for the Opening Ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and of discrete 5.1 surround at the 2006 Torino Games. He was there for the first deployment of discrete 5.1 audio throughout all event venues at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. By the time of the London Games in 2012, Dixon had established dedicated 5.1-mixing environments in separate trailers with proper acoustical treatment and monitoring, and his A1s used consoles that had been adapted to his specifications, all with the goal of freeing the A1s to be better able to focus on the mix.
