March Madness 2021: Broadcast Audio Mixes in Crowd Sound - Real and Augmented Short turnaround, venues' varied capabilities complicate the effort By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Friday, March 26, 2021 - 7:00 am
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March Madness is off to a noisy start, thanks to a combination of fans finally allowed in the stands and augmented crowd sounds.
Aboard NEP Supershooter 9 mobile production unit, A1 Dave Grundtvig is mixing games from Lucas Oil Stadium, whose football field has been divided at the 50-yard line into two courts. He takes in a feed from the Firehouse Productions crowd-sound system, which is also fed into the venue PA system and mixed in with the actual crowd noise, from the 6,000 or so spectators allowed in, through the six ambience microphones Grundtvig has deployed.
At Lucas Oil Stadium's March Madness venue, a feed from the Firehouse Productions crowd-sound system is fed into the venue PA system and mixed with actual crowd noise.
It's mostly the same [augmented] crowd sounds used by the NBA, and the balance has been good, he says. The PA hasn't been overpowering, and we're getting good reaction from the fans. So, overall, it sounds very natural.
What's missing from the mix, notes Grundtvig, are the cheerleaders and school bands, which no artificial sound system has managed to simulate yet. It sounds good, but it could never sound like it does when the stands are full and the bands are playing. But we're still able to get the sound on-air well-balanced.
Variation on Augmented Sound The augmented crowd sound will vary from venue to venue, mainly because not every venue has a dedicated sound system for the artificial audio. The variability is largely due to the short notice on March Madness this year.
Our entire rehearsal period for three days before the first game sounded like there was an arena full of people, and that is a strange feeling, observes Mark Dittmar, VP, Firehouse Productions, which is providing the games' crowd-sound PA systens and its mixers - they prefer the term sweeteners - who fire preset crowd-effects audio cues instead of riding faders. The front-of-house mixer loved it because he could find the pocket he needed to be in right off the bat, instead of adjusting things. All those adjustments you have to make as the game goes on, he was already there; he knew exactly what the entire room was going to sound like.
As a result, Dittmar adds, the venue sound was very consistent from rehearsal to air, thanks to what he calls a virtual aircheck.
Firehouse Productions also installed the dedicated PA systems being used for the crowd-sound systems in most of the March Madness venues, which also include arenas at Ball State, Butler University, the Horizon League, Indiana University, and Purdue University.
With the experience we've had with NBA and the All-Star Game, Dittmar says, I realized that what most people try to do is come in with a few monitor wedges or something like that and face it towards the court. That doesn't work. We're using concert-size line arrays - in this case, six-box hangs of [L-Acoustics] K2 - at levels where we were 60 dB off clipping the system. It's very loud. It's easily 103 dB.
Audio Is a Team Effort Joe Carpenter worked aboard Game Creek Columbia at Butler University's Hinkle Fieldhouse - site of both the 1986 film Hoosiers and the story it was based on - for first-round games last weekend. One issue he faced was the ambience of the venue, whose ceiling acted like a parabolic reflector, exacerbating the room's innate boominess. That was largely mitigated with the addition of acoustical treatments. The interaction between the room, the house PA system, and the augmented-crowd-sound speaker arrays presented the same challenges that Carpenter's colleagues on the broadcast encountered.
At Butler University's Hinkle Fieldhouse, the ceiling acted like a parabolic reflector, intensifying the venue's boominess and requiring acoustical mitigation.
The NCAA wants it to be loud and exciting, and we're trying to do a television show, Carpenter points out. It's the age-old battle. It's not necessarily a conflict; I understand both sides of it, and we always find a way to make it work.
It's a team effort, he continues. It's just that there's a lot of elements, and a lot of them are in different places than usual, like where they seat the fans, which is in the end zones by the baskets here. I had to move my crowd mics three times. Nothing's ideal.
Another challenge created by COVID configurations is to match A1s with different production and announcer teams for each game, rather than creating a unit to serve an entire bracket. One way that is manifested is the often significant disparity in natural voice levels between announcers.
For instance, Carpenter explains, the other day I went from Carter Blackburn, who projects really loudly and very directly, and Deb Antonelli, who surprised me by how directly she also projects, to Ian Eagle and Grant Hill, who naturally speak at a lot lower level. I found I was literally putting 12 dB more input gain in my play-by-play headsets and about 8 dB more in the color headsets. All of that high-mid from the room and real and artificial fans increased everything by 20 dB in my center channel. I don't think I've ever bounced back and forth so much between 5.1 and stereo in any event. I was struggling to create lanes to put my effects in there.
The Building Sings' Phil Adler served as A1 at Purdue University's Mackey Arena, where the First Four games were played. Mixing aboard Game Creek Celtic, he had 24 channels of cabling in the venue, but some had to be devoted to other audio - intercoms, for instance - limiting to 10 t
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March Madness 2021: Broadcast Audio Mixes in Crowd Sound - Real and Augmented Short turnaround, venues' varied capabilities complicate the effort By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
