One Week In, NFL Crowds' Are Finding Their Sound Footing A1s are adapting to a new element in their mixes By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Friday, September 18, 2020 - 9:48 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
The NFL has gotten through Week 1, and the crowds at the games seem to like the way it sounds. The league has joined other sports in creating its own crowd-sound system.
In doing so, the NFL took a very different path from the NBA, whose players are the focus of its faux-crowd-sound system. While football players on the gridiron hear a constant buzz of crowd sound played continuously at about 70 dB through the stadium PA systems, intended to provide a semblance of crowd noise, home viewers of NFL games get a constantly changing soundscape intended to dynamically follow the action on the field.
Mixers have five levels of intensity to choose as they follow the action on the field. In addition, they can lay three levels of positive- and negative-reaction crowd sounds atop the ambience tracks.
Like the NBA, the NFL uses a separate mix team for these sounds. The league's kit for this, developed by consultant Robert Brock and drawing on content collected and edited by NFL Films, uses the Wwise videogame-authoring platform.
New to the A1s Like the fans at home, NFL A1s encountered the new crowd-sound system for the first time when the league started play on Thursday, Sept. 10. Wendel Stevens, who mixed the season opener for NBC with Super Bowl champs Chiefs vs. the Texans in Kansas City, barely had to touch the faders that would bring the prerecorded crowd sounds into the broadcast mix: thanks to local regulations that allowed nearly 16,000 fans in the seats, there was enough input for his crowd microphones to generate a respectable roar when needed. He used the prerecorded crowd-sound feed, submixed by Jesse Van Der Vyver, just once, for the banner-reveal moment at the beginning of the show.
A relatively sparse audience of almost 16,000 at the NFL opener in Kansas City was enough to create a semblance of crowd noise, but it has fallen to the league's newly minted corps of curated-crowd-sound mixers and broadcast's veteran A1s to re-create that for most other games this season, using prerecorded crowd audio files.
By Sunday night's NBC primetime Rams-Cowboys game in Los Angeles, though, crowd-sound mixer Phil Gebhardt had his hands full.
The NFL-curated sounds were awesome, says Stevens. The issue is the dynamics, and getting them to follow the ebb and flow of how a real crowd would react.
He notes that Gebhardt was able to create a credible crowd dynamic but also had to ride the overall crowd-sound submix to some extent to match what his decades of experience mixing live football told him the crowd swells should be. For instance, the steady-murmur tracks that the NFL system defaults to when the crowd-sound mixer isn't adding any action-specific reaction elements felt inauthentic to him.
When an NFL crowd is quiet, they're quiet, he says, noting that he sometimes pulled those moments down slightly in the overall mix. That constant murmur can take away from the realism. Also, it can wear on the ears after a while. That's why dynamics are so important.
Working the Bengals-Rams game on Sunday, Phil Adler, a veteran football A1 for CBS, says he was pleasantly surprised, calling it a good experience after some initial hesitancy: My concern was that I was going to have to coach the [crowd mixer] while mixing my own game. Instead, Aaron Sharpe, who mixed the crowds for my show, understood what he had to do, which was follow the game.
Adler credits Sharpe, a musician and DJ who lives in the Cincinnati area, with knowing his market - NFL crowd-sound mixers are assigned to a specific team and its stadium - and diligently applying the training materials the NFL provided, keeping the crowds tuned to what the Bengals' home-crowd reactions would be. He adds that wasn't the case with a few other games whose highlights he has listened to.
The strength and the Achilles heel of this system is the operator, Adler stresses. That person has to understand how a real crowd acts and has to understand football. It's dynamic and fluid, and Aaron got it. Not everyone did on Week 1. But, Week 1, everyone gets a pass, because this is so new.
Adler is impressed with the sonic quality of the NFL's crowd-sound files. He used the Calrec Artemis's four-band EQ aboard Game Creek Columbia to notch the files' overall tone down 2 dB-3 dB at 7 kHz to reduce what he perceived as some harshness in the sounds and to better blend them into the larger broadcast mix and with the four high-up venue ambience microphones he was also mixing in.
Once he had that dialed in, Adler says, he could almost believe there was a crowd in the stands. I heard the Let's go, Bengals!' chant come up, and it caught me off guard. I asked Aaron, was that you? And of course, it was; there was nobody in the seats! It sounded that good.
We're All Learning Vince Caputo, VP/supervising sound mixer, NFL Films, who oversees the crowd-sound initiative, says everyone learned more in a single day of actual games than in all the practice sessions conducted using recently archived game videos. The main takeaway, he says, is the need for crowd-sound mixers to better anticipate events on the field and to react to them more the way partisan fans would. This would also make the best use of the crowd-sound audio, which was sourced specifically from each team's stadium during previous seasons.
Home fans are always optimistic, Caputo points out. They start to cheer before the receiver catches the ball or just as they see the sack coming. If you try to catch up to the action, if you wait to see what happens, you're too late. And if you're wrong
Most recent headlines
09/11/2025
Dalet today announced a transformative leap forward for media operations: Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) that unifies the Dalet ecosystem under one natura...
28/10/2025
ESPN Announces Monsters Funday Football', Its Latest Real-Time Animated Bro...
28/10/2025
SVG All-Stars: Catherine Chalfant, Manager, Remote Operations, ESPNThe Ole Miss alum is an operational force behind ESPN's extensive college-football catalo...
28/10/2025
Elevating the experience: AI and data take Ryder Cup to the next level By Joe OHalloran
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 - 10:25
Print This Story
NBC produced th...
28/10/2025
Conquering the Air (waves): Taking a close up look at the IBC Accelerator Priva...
28/10/2025
World Series 2025: Spectrum SportsNet LA Brings Dodgers Fans Closer to the Actio...
28/10/2025
Dylan Southern and Benedict Cumberbatch at the premiere of The Thing with Feathers (photo by George Pimentel / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)...
28/10/2025
For three weeks in Lagos, Spotify's Greasy Tunes Caf pop-up brought the cit...
28/10/2025
Once a niche subculture, German rap has evolved into an influential cultural movement. Now, Spotify is giving the genre a new home with OFFCULT, a playlist dedi...
28/10/2025
Shane Delia's Malta serves up the Mediterranean this summer
28 October, 2025
Media releases
Feast on 9,000 years of culinary history Mondays from 24 No...
28/10/2025
SBS's global sporting festival continues with the FIVB Beach Volleyball Worl...
28/10/2025
Bilbao, October 28, 2025 - AgileTV, a leading technology solutions company for t...
28/10/2025
Disney, NBCUniversal, FOX, Paramount Each Achieve Double-Digit Monthly Growth
...
28/10/2025
CINCINNATI The E.W. Scripps Company has announced an agreement to sell WRTV, its local ABC-affiliated station in Indianapolis, to Circle City Broadcasting for $...
28/10/2025
Berklee College of Music and Berklee Valencia Named to Billboards 2025 Top Music...
28/10/2025
NEW YORK As AI usage continues to spike, a new study from IAB delves into an important aspect of how AI is transforming the advertising business with new data s...
28/10/2025
Charlie Jablonski, a broadcast tech pioneer who helped shape the modern era of Olympics television coverage, died Oct. 25 at his home in Lake George N.Y., the N...
28/10/2025
VIENNA, Austria Bitmovin has launched Bitmovin Observability, a new stand-alone video data solution that delivers real-time insights into video playback. The so...
28/10/2025
LOS ANGELES LucidLink, the file streaming platform, has announced a Frame.io integration and expanded mobile capabilities at Adobe Max....
28/10/2025
Mediagenix, a global leader in smart content solutions to profitably connect the right content to the right audience, today announced that it has joined the Ama...
28/10/2025
Lightware, an industry leader in connectivity and signal management solutions, has announced a major update to its Taurus
platform, which now delivers flawless...
28/10/2025
Following a successful mid-September International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, Hiltron Communications will promote its full range of satellite communi...
28/10/2025
Open Broadcast Systems has chosen MC&S (Media Consulting & Services) as a reseller to help strengthen its presence in France.
With over twenty years of experi...
28/10/2025
Bitmovin, leading provider of video streaming solutions, has launched Bitmovin Observability, a new stand-alone video data solution that delivers real-time insi...
28/10/2025
Ease Live, the leader in interactive TV technology, today announced the successful launch of interactive graphical overlays for UEFA Champions League matches fo...
28/10/2025
LucidLink, the file streaming platform, today at Adobe MAX announced a Frame.io integration and expanded mobile capabilities, streamlining collaboration and hel...
28/10/2025
ATLANTA Gray Media has promoted Nick Hasenecz to general manager of WNDU, its NBC affiliate in the South Bend-Elkhart, Ind., market....
28/10/2025
Applications Open for Berklee Fenway Neighborhood Improvement Grant Boston nonprofits can apply by December 12 for funding to support community projects that ...
28/10/2025
28 Oct 2025
VEON's JazzCash Wins Silver Award for Innovation in Lending at ...
28/10/2025
Guests include Wayne Rooney, Maya Jama, Dame Laura Kenny, Chloe Kelly, Chris McC...
28/10/2025
The two-hour special, recorded live from the iconic Dolby Theatre in LA, will ai...
28/10/2025
Eutelsat upgrades teleports with Rohde & Schwarz satellite uplink amplifiers High efficiency and resilient Ku-band amplifiers for excellent RF performance
...
28/10/2025
These appointments come at a pivotal time for ABC, as the organisation continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of a digital-first media ecosystem. The ne...
28/10/2025
Scripps Research awarded $4 million to advance platform for neurodevelopmental disorders The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) grant support...
27/10/2025
You can touch this: Haptics becoming central to the virtual live experience By Adrian Pennington
Friday, October 24, 2025 - 09:12
Print This Story
The vid...
27/10/2025
A tale of two trailers: France's Stop & Go doubles up with its new hybrid tr...
27/10/2025
Pro Padel League Stages City's Cup Finals Inside NYC's Hammerstein Ballr...
27/10/2025
World Series 2025: Sportsnet Delivers Made-in-Canada' Moment for a Nation U...
27/10/2025
ESPN Extends Partnership With Sony's Beyond Sports To Expand Animated Altern...
27/10/2025
Reid Davenport attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Life After at The Ray Theatre on January 27, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Robin Marsha...
27/10/2025
As the days grow shorter and the nights get darker, there's nothing like getting swept up in a story that sends shivers down your spine. In honor of spooky ...
27/10/2025
UPDATE: Both parties have reached a new carriage agreement....
27/10/2025
LONDON As Hollywood jumps into the production of mini-dramas, a new study from Ampere Analysis finds that more than one in 10 internet users have watched drama ...
27/10/2025
LONDON Yealink, a provider of unified communication and collaboration solutions, has joined the NDI ecosystem with the availability of its SmartVision 80 premiu...
27/10/2025
ATLANTA Gray Media has named Chris Conroy as general manager of its stations in Cleveland, leading WOIO, a CBS affiliate, The CW station WUAB and Telemundo outl...
27/10/2025
ESPOO, Finland European connectivity leaders Nokia and Ericsson, have partnered with Berlin's Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), to shape and drive ...
27/10/2025
PHILADELPHIA Comcast has expanded NOW TV Latino, its Spanish-language live TV and streaming offering, adding five more channels from Univision, ViX Premium with...
27/10/2025
Test & measurement innovator, Leader Electronics, will present its latest products and solutions at InterBEE 2025 (Hall 5, Booth 5218) Makuhari Messe in Chiba, ...
27/10/2025
Back to All News
City of Shadows, the New Netflix Thriller Arrives on December 12
Entertainment
27 October 2025
GlobalSpain
Link copied to clipboard
Downl...
One Week In, NFL Crowds' Are Finding Their Sound Footing A1s are adapting to a new element in their mixes By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
