AEW Grand Slam: Dynamite & Collision - Big Sound at Arthur Ashe Stadium Team produces both in-venue and broadcast audio for the noisy wrestling event By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Wednesday, September 25, 2024 - 3:31 pm
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Arthur Ashe Stadium has long had noise complaints when it hosts the US Open tennis tournaments, but its neighbors haven't heard anything until they hear the racket generated by the All Elite Wrestling (AEW) Grand Slam: Dynamite & Collision, which takes place there tonight. Spectators at the combined Dynamite and Collision events are expected to fill the venue's nearly 24,000 seats for a raucous evening, which will be broadcast on TBS and, for the first time, live streamed, via PPV Triller TV.
It's the combined events' fourth consecutive year at the stadium, before it heads to Brisbane, Australia, for its first-ever visit there, in February.
Like most AEW events, Grand Slam: Dynamite & Collision is produced in-house, from AEW's own Live Media Group-built truck. The Nashville office of Sound Image, now a Clair Global subsidiary, has operated various AEW events' live-production and broadcast interface for five years.
Wrestling as Theater All wrestling is theater, and the production embraces it as such, boosting the volume and the impact of sound effects to support the wrestlers' mythical narratives and keep the crowds roaring.
It is theater, and it is loud, acknowledges Philip Piercy, crew chief/systems engineer/project audio lead, Sound Image. I've been touring for a long time, with music and events, and this is truly unique. It's interesting to watch and hear the crowds react to how the stories play out on stage, and it's rewarding knowing that I can add to that, adjusting the sound system as the show progresses. It's not linear, like a concert. You're never exactly sure how things will turn out.
Arthur Ashe Stadium preps for the fourth straight year of AEW Grand Slam: Dynamite & Collision.
The PA system takes its audio feed directly from the broadcast truck, its consoles - a DiGiCo Quantum 338 and Calrec Apollo over a Hydra2 network, connected via MADI and Dante, respectively - mixing the live show and broadcast separately and simultaneously. Frequency Coordination Group provides the wireless audio for the event, including backstage and ringside interviews that are simulcast on-air and on the large, curved screen, provided by vendor partner Fuse Video, that Sound Image deploys. Two rotating crews handle sound, video, and lighting, traveling 52 weeks a year and doing two or three live shows every week on Wednesdays and Saturdays, as well as special events, such as Pay Per Views.
We're in charge of all the venue audio, notes Piercy, but we're also providing the control package. So we're in charge of the front-of-house audio, and all of that interacts with the broadcast trucks. All the inputs, playback, commercials, pre-tapes, microphones hit the broadcast truck and are sent to us. Ultimately, it is a TV show first, but the live show energizes the audience and becomes a big part of what the television audience will see and hear.
A JBL VTX A12 sound system installed at Arthur Ashe Stadium helps energize the audience.
What they're hearing comes from various crowd mics deployed throughout the venue, some hung from the lighting rigging used with Ashe Stadium's roof closed (which also further amplifies the interior noise), and from camera-mounted shotgun mics used to pick up the sometimes very physical and contentious interaction between wrestlers even before they get into the ring. There are also key effects microphones, such as the Audix D6 cardioid dynamic mics placed facing upwards beneath the ring's floormat, functioning for wrestling much as they do for the kick-drum microphones they were designed to be for live music.
When they pick up a slam on the mat, the crowd hears that, and it sounds like it really hurts, in the PA system and on the air, Piercy says. It's up to the mixer in the truck how much he uses of that. We get all the same mic inputs as the broadcast does, and we can use any of them in the PA. The crowd gets plenty of sound.
That PA is a JBL VTX A12 system, with seven hangs comprising A12 boxes around the venue, four hangs of A8 boxes in a center cluster, and four hangs of VTX S28 subs, Some B28s are also planned for deployment at the Grand Slam: Dynamite & Collision event.
The event gets bigger in a larger venue, and the music gets louder, Piercy notes, so the sound system has to be bigger, too.
Music Choices It's a large system designed to support a large story, as much opera as sport, with music choices carefully crafted to reveal each wrestler's persona, Not unlike walk-up music played as MLB batters approach the plate, the song tells the wrestler's epic backstory - in a minute or less.
With the entrance songs that these guys walk out to, Piercy points out, you can tell a lot about their character based on whether it's a rock song or a mellow song or something else. Some of the wrestlers have [arrangements] with certain [music] artists, and the crowd knows the songs and associate the character with the song. It's part of the history of the sport. A lot of people might wonder why you need a concert-level PA system for a wrestling match. But it's more than just that. You're seeing an entire story unfold.
