The Semi-Invisible Sound System Bringing the World Cup to Your Ears

The thump of a goal kick. The patter of a volley. The murmuring swell of the crowd as a striker breaks away. The errant blare of a trumpet.

Soccer, like any other sport, has its own unique sonic profile. At the World Cup, that profile is even more important to share with the masses. That's why a network of over 650 wireless and wired microphones has gone live around greater Rio de Janeiro and beyond, to capture the location sounds of the Beautiful Game's biggest stage with meticulous ambient detail.

The array is made up of 36 Esfera two-channel surround microphone units scattered across the tournament's twelve stadiums, according to a press release from Sennheiser, the German audio company contracted to record the location sounds of this year's Cup. These are mainly for picking up general stadium ambience, including in the player's tunnels.

On-site processors convert this to 5.1 surround sound "from the signal of a compact stereo microphone," Sennheiser adds.

At field level, a hodgepodge of around 300 shotgun mics—long guns for faraway noises, short guns and stero mics for mid- and close-range noises—roll tape on the action at the various matches. What's more, 46 reporter mics have been mounted at pitch's edge, further picking up all the little things that would otherwise go unheard. It all gives spectators who tune in from around the world the sense that they're right there, laced up, in the flow of things.

The kicker is that this array goes largely unseen. If you look closely, you can sometimes catch a windscreened shotgun mic or two when a camera angle briefly pulls in tight on a player or bench. But other than that, it's like soccer's slate of noises, blipping across the full sonic spectrum as they do on the World Cup stage, come through as if by magic.

To that point, the World Cup's acoustic array is perhaps yet another innovation being field-tested as soccer becomes more data-driven, with new goal-line technology and advanced tracking metrics pushing the sport's boundaries to crisper, smarter new territories. And it's never sounded better, at least when you watch on a television with a decent enough soundsystem instead of just streaming games over your laptop's shitty speakers.

Either way, it sure beats barreling down the sidelines, tripping over an inconspicuous shotgun mic, and eating shit on international television.