Live From NBA All-Star 2023: Firehouse Productions, WBD Sports Streamline Audio Infrastructure for Weekend Events Growing connection of entertainment and sports produces signal-flow changes By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Friday, February 17, 2023 - 10:29 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
The recent Super Bowl Halftime Show was hailed as the third-most-watched television show in history, with an estimated 118 million people tuning in to see Rihanna - 5+ million more viewers than the game itself attracted. But that annual event has become just the highest peak in a mountain range of entertainment that has been partnering with major sports events.
At the NBA All-Star Game at Salt Lake City's Vivint Arena this weekend, global superstar Post Malone will perform a medley of hits following the first-ever in-arena NBA All-Star Draft, part of a weekend's worth of entertainment and sports events that will also include Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and record producer Burna Boy, 2023 Grammy Award winner and Oscar-nominated singer/producer Tems, and rapper Rema, who will collectively headline an Afrobeats-themed NBA All-Star Game Halftime Show.
The list of broadcast entertainment and sports combinations has only grown in recent years, as has the complexity of putting on both types of productions in the same place at the same time.
It Was Becoming a Mess' [The event] had turned into 22 different shows, television and radio stations, and games, all with their microphones and cabling and consoles. It was becoming a mess, says Mark Dittmar, VP, Firehouse Productions, which produces the live-event side of NBA and other major-league events and also fabricated the NBA's COVID bubble in Orlando in 2020 and 2021. Dave [Grundtvig, senior audio supervisor, remote operations, Warner Brothers Discovery Sports] and I set out to fix that a few years ago and have continued to improve on it.
JBL V25 boxes will be configured in 11 line arrays of various lengths to cover Vivint Arena seating areas and court, a design intended to keep speech intelligibility high and overall volume low.
At Vivint Arena, Dittmar notes, there are 170 users on the Riedel Artist intercom system alone, with more on a separate system in the broadcast compound. Hundreds of microphones and other transducers will be deployed.
Corralling the Complexity To manage that complexity, Firehouse (which is also managing the event's RF) and WBD Sports collaborated to consolidate as much of the event's signal path as possible: for instance, setting up various key elements, such as crowd microphones, as shared resources and sending them as splits to any broadcast participants that want to use them. They are also creating two separate 5.1 mixes - one of the games and other sports events, the other of the entertainment performances - and making them available as MADI streams to the broadcast stakeholders. They've also set up two separate teams responsible for managing all that audio in both the arena and the broadcast compound, so any issues in either domain can be addressed without having to cross that threshold.
Firehouse Productions shipped 116 boxes of components of a PA system to Las Vegas for NBA All-Star Weekend in Salt Lake City.
We're not providing every microphone; some companies will still deploy some of their own, for such purposes as studio shows and courtside reporters, says Dittmar. But we're covering a good chunk of the microphones used, and anyone who needs that audio can just grab it from us. It has drastically reduced clutter in the building and the compound, such as cabling, and that helps reduce the potential for problems to develop.
Live Sound For the house, Firehouse Productions is also deploying what Dittmar describes as a very large PA system, comprising 116 JBL V25 boxes configured in 11 line arrays of various lengths covering the seating areas and the court. The longest arrays will have 16 boxes each, the length intended to tightly focus the sound without the need for more amplification. The strategy is to keep speech intelligibility high while staying within what Dittmar describes as the NBA's very strict venue decibel limits: 88 dBA, with an LEQ (equivalent continuous sound level, or the total sound energy over time) of 30.
The reason is that [the NBA wants] the entertainment and the game to be at about the same levels, he explains. They don't want fans hearing a huge disparity between music and basketball, to make it feel as though they were competing with each other for attention. The point of the PA-system design is control of the sound: directivity and intelligibility. On a PA system like this, where the sound doesn't go is as important as where it does.
There's Money in Entertainment The increasing intersection between sports and entertainment, especially live music with high-profile stars, is proving lucrative for broadcasters and leagues. The NHL All-Star Game has sold out its broadcast-advertising inventory, Ad Week reports, with 23 new advertisers signing on for this year's events.
A massive Riedel Artist intercom system is ready to be deployed at Vivint Arena.
Developing more-organized audio source and signal-path management is critical to keeping the workflow controlled as sports and music continue to intertwine, Dittmar says: There's a lot going on there and more and more companies that have a piece of it. We're figuring out better ways to manage that.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Live From NBA All-Star 2023: Firehouse Productions, WBD Sports Streamline Audio Infrastructure for Weekend Events Growing connection of entertainment and sports produces signal-flow changes By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
