Is television audio recorded in surround?
A little, with mostly foley and crowds with a surround mic. As in film, most mixers would prefer just plain mono effects, preferring to do the placement and enhancement themselves to better fit the scene. The exception would be the Olympics or the X-Games, where the philosophy is more towards “hyper-realism” where a great number of mics (mono, stereo and surround) are employed to capture all the nuances in the audio of the performance.
