The Mouse That Roared: Disney's 100th Anniversary Marks a Century of Sound that ESPN Built On ESPN has helped lead broadcast-sports audio innovation during its years under the Disney umbrella By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Monday, November 20, 2023 - 3:30 pm
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In October, 1923, Walt Disney and his brother Roy set up the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio for their first animation efforts. Those Alice Comedies were quickly followed by a couple of silent toons featuring a certain mouse who would finally gain lasting fame five years later with Steamboat Willie, one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound as well as one of the first animated shorts to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack.
Walt had been inspired by 1927's The Jazz Singer, regarded as cinema's first proper talkie film. He committed fully to synched sound - he mortgaged his house and sold his car to get the $5,000 the audio for the animated short cost, an enormous sum at the time - and never looked back. Coming decades would see Disney at the cutting edge of audio technology for visual media, including milestones like a three-channel system for Leopold Stokowski's soundtrack for The Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of the landmark animation feature Fantasia in 1940.
A1 Scott Pray at the audio board for Monday Night Football back in 2016.
ESPN Carries The Torch It's an audio torch that ESPN has been carrying since it was founded in 1979 and continued when it became part of the Disney fold in 1996, when the Mouse Factory acquired the sports network's parent company ABC/Cap Cities. In that time, ESPN helped broadcast-sports audio through its various inflections, from mono to stereo, through various flavors of surround, and ultimately to the brink of immersive sound. Disney's 100th anniversary is a good vantage point from which to look back at those audio iterations through the eyes and ears of those who helped lead it.
Henry Rousseau, ESPN's recently retired senior operations specialist,
Henry Rousseau, ESPN's recently retired senior operations specialist, who joined the fledgling network in 1981, recalls the first ESPN game broadcast in stereo, a Denver vs. Oakland USFL game in June, 1984, which he says went smoothly. Not every show did so in the early days, however. Of a particular 1990 MLB game working from a newly commissioned production control room adapted for stereo audio, he remembers, We were working pretty much all through the night and we didn't have a chance to really fax it out through the satellite. We did our first game and we got a call from our boss at the time, Bill Lamb, and he says, I'm not hearing the nat sounds. We traced it down and come to find out that the phase was reversed on the left channel! So in between a break, we go down there, literally switch the wires, and everything was fine. And that was [one of] our first forays into stereo and in learning how to fax properly at that time.
The transition to stereo was in part driven by more music being incorporated into sports broadcasts at the time, as MTV, which launched in 1981 and which solidified television as a music medium.
ESPN lead audio engineer Scott Pray
A lot of it had to do with the music, says ESPN lead audio engineer Scott Pray, who joined the network as an A1 in 1984, before many of the legalities of the intersection of music and sports became clear. In the early days [the network was] playing anything we could get our hands on. We would play like Huey Lewis & the News a lot of other groups that had some kind of a song that we could loop. And there was a competition as to who could loop the song the best and get it on the air. And that's what we would play with our daily affiliate feeds and highlights. And it got so popular that we used to get calls from the groups themselves thanking us for putting 'em on the air.
Stereo may have doubled the number of broadcast channels, but it was still a simpler time operationally, though everyone was still learning on the job.
We actually had to worry about four channels, which was the stereo mix, and then we would always put the nat sound on channels three and four, but that was it, says Rousseau. We didn't have to worry about international, so it was very, very simple. Edits were sometimes complicated, but the guys at that time, they didn't worry about edits. They would just fix it, live on air, make their corrections, and move forward. So being only concerned with just four channels of audio made life very easy at that point.
Pray added that when an international channel was needed, it was still mono, and there was always a mono channel backup at the ready.
Now it's hard to quantify now many channels of audio on transmission paths we put out, he says. but some days it can top 200 channels of audio that we actually send back to the network.
The shift to stereo also produced some new opportunities for effects capture on the playing field.
When we moved from mono to stereo, that gave us a little more space [in which] to put things, explains Pray. [With mono], everything was right down the middle: you were listening to your announcers straight in the middle, the music was in the middle, the effects were in the middle. There's just no space there. But once we spread the effects out to left and right, the announcers were still [phantom] centered [but] that gave us a little extra space to hear those nat sounds better when the music comes in in stereo. You hear that there's a little more separation between your announcers and your music and your effects. It's not jammed all into that one middle channel.
The late Ron Scalise was ESPN's chief remote audio engineer in the 1990s.
Pray and Rousseau both credit the late Ron Scalise, the netw
