
Augmented Crowd Sound Gears Up for New Sports Seasons Fledgling audio-industry sector ponders relevance in a post-COVID landscape By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - 10:48 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
Last year, enhanced-crowd-sound systems helped make sports during COVID seem almost normal. This year, they're poised to do the same - and, perhaps, more.
Having provided the NBA's 2020 season what was widely regarded as a highly authentic-sounding augmented crowd-sound experience, Firehouse Productions is reprising that role for basketball in the 2021 season, which began in December, and is doing the same for the NHL's new season, scheduled to tip off on Jan. 13.
Last year, both leagues played their seasons in so-called bubbles: the NBA in a multi-court venue in Orlando and the NHL in two venues, in Ottawa and Winnipeg. This year, their games will be played in the teams' home venues, and that has brought about a change in deployment and operation of Firehouse Productions' crowd-sound systems. Instead of three or four operators working a pair of iPads and two Launchpads, a crowd-sound mixer at each venue will be working solo on two Launchpad system controllers.
This year, all NBA teams are pumping the crowd audio through the venue PA systems, with some acquiring -through either purchase or rental - additional PA boxes focused on the arena's courts, to energize the athletes. Among other changes this season is that use and operation of augmented crowd sounds are being left to individual teams' discretion, versus being under the control of the league last season.
Working remotely at Fox Studios' Los Angeles facility, Sonofans mixers handle augmented crowd sound for a USC game at United Airlines Field at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
The NHL, which last year used a crowd-sound system developed by EA Sports and other partners, will use the same Launchpad-based controller as the NBA, with audio sources coming from Firehouse Productions' own vault of venue- and team-specific recordings. That sound will be played through the hockey arenas' existing PA systems, which will not use additional PA components to augment the venue sound.
Both leagues have mandated that the virtualized crowd sound be played as part of game-broadcast audio.
According to Firehouse Productions VP Mark Dittmar, about half of NBA teams have augmented their PA systems with court-facing speakers, in some cases with high-end concert-level systems.
You're trying to get the sound up to around 105 dB from 150 ft. away, he says, so you need a pretty powerful system. The NHL crowd sound will be played just from the arena's existing center-cluster PA systems facing out onto the stands from below the scoreboards.
He adds that the main challenge this season is less about applying its crowd-sound solution to an entirely new sport - hockey - than about readying the system for both leagues' playing in a combined 60-plus arenas and curating the appropriate sounds for each of them in a highly compressed time span.
We had three months to put together the systems for the NBA [bubble] last year; we had more like two weeks to get ready for everyone playing at home this year, he says. We had to train more mixers and provide technical support for them, too. And we had to develop more content, because the teams wanted more team-specific content, like chants and songs, and the sound design for the NBA and NHL is very different. The teams want to be able to try different things with the crowd sounds, so we're giving them options.
Streamlining the System Unlike Firehouse Productions, which existed before COVID-19, Los Angeles-based Sonofans was largely a product of the pandemic, founded by Fred Vogler, a multiple-Grammy Award-winning audio engineer and mixer who had been working as principal sound designer and FOH mixer for the Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall, among other roles. For him, fanless sports presented an opportunity, one that he quickly leveraged into producing the virtualized crowd sound for much of the MLB's postseason, including the World Series, and for most of Fox Sports' main NFL games during the past season, as well as some collegiate football, professional bowling, and the Mike Tyson-Roy Jones Jr. eight-round exhibition match in late November at Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Sonofans' crowd-sound platform uses Ableton Live as the software engine; Akai triggering pads let two-person audio teams access team-, league- and venue-specific content from Apple Mac Mini computers and an array of hard drives. Vogler has also found ways to streamline the platform and make it more productive and efficient as it enters its second set of sports seasons. That includes adding pedals to the triggering pads, essentially letting a single operator have an additional hand or two to keep the audio tightly responsive to the action on the field or court.
We've been looking at how we can reduce the number of operators needed and other system requirements, to make it more cost-effective, he explains. How we can make one person be able to do more, as long as the randomizing feature in the software keeps it from sounding the same.
vCROWD Meets AI UK-based Salsa Sound - which began life as a developer of automated audio mixing and augmented field-sound effects for broadcasters and such sports teams as the Premier League's Manchester City - has extended its portfolio to include providing crowd sounds for U.S. sports teams and leagues -MLS and USL soccer, the NWSL (for which the company supplied crowd sound for CBS's Challenge Cup broadcasts) - as well as for the Big Ten Network's hockey, football, and men's and women's basketball. According to Rob Oldfield, co-founder/CEO, Salsa Soun
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
02/05/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
01/05/2026
January 5 2026, 18:30 (PST) NBCUniversal's Peacock to Be First Streamer to ...
01/04/2026
January 4 2026, 18:00 (PST) DOLBY AND DOUYIN EMPOWER THE NEXT GENERATON OF CREATORS WITH DOLBY VISION
Douyin Users Can Now Create And Share Videos With Stun...
13/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/03/2026
Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) today announced Spectrum X Plus, the newest generation of its Spectrum X media server, offering double the channel density of previous ...
13/03/2026
When Ewing Covenant Church made the decision to return to its original, historic building, affectionately called 1867 Sanctuary for weekly worship, the congre...
13/03/2026
Marshall Electronics introduces its first all-IP 4K POV camera, the CV574-WP, at NAB 2026 (Booth C8339). The CV574-WP supports NDI |HX, providing ultra-efficien...
13/03/2026
At NAB Show 2026, Net Insight introduces Nimbra 520, a high-density media processing node designed to simplify live contribution and distribution across both ma...
13/03/2026
Abandon Editorial Signs With Micha l Dimitri for West Coast Representation
Brie Clayton March 12, 2026
0 Comments
Abandon Editorial is excited to part...
13/03/2026
Documentary The Bulldogs Shot and Edited with Blackmagic Design
Brie Clayton March 12, 2026
0 Comments
Editorial tools helped shape film in real time,...
13/03/2026
AE Captions as Fast as CapCut - No Plugins
Graham Quince March 12, 2026
0 Comments
Stop wasting hours clicking through nested compositions and manuall...
13/03/2026
New Music USA and Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice Announce 2026 Nex...
12/03/2026
Staines-upon-Thames, UK, 11th March, 2026 - Yospace, the trusted leader in Dyna...
12/03/2026
Utah Scientific Expands Technology Partner Program With Integrations From Audina...
12/03/2026
Techex, a global expert in live video solutions over IP and cloud, announces the appointment of Matt McKee as Senior Director, Sales, Americas, further strength...
12/03/2026
KOKUSAI DENKI Electric America has appointed Mondae Hott as Regional Sales Manag...
12/03/2026
At the 2026 NAB Show, Interra Systems will showcase its latest advancements in a...
12/03/2026
The 15th National Games of China concluded after a two-week celebration of athletic excellence and regional collaboration. Held from Nov. 9-21 across Guangdong,...
12/03/2026
Live-production academic program Butler Sports Live produced a total of 40 fall-...
12/03/2026
The University of Nebraska's HuskerVision has completed the second phase of ...
12/03/2026
Grass Valley and integration partner Tab M Solutions have completed Phase 1 of a...
12/03/2026
The broadcaster expands its campus-production model as the university handles tw...
12/03/2026
Disney has announced the addition of March Madness - the NCAA Division I Men...
12/03/2026
Apple TV's Friday Night Baseball MLB doubleheader series returns for its f...
12/03/2026
The senior from New Jersey is making his mark in South Bend, both on the mic and behind it...
12/03/2026
After a relatively quiet January, the month of February was jammed packed with l...
12/03/2026
Long-time production partner Echo Entertainment is producing the broadcast, while Cosm played a vital role in the collaboration...
12/03/2026
By Jessica Herndon
We love kicking off each year by introducing the world to po...
12/03/2026
Samrat Chakrabarti, George Basil, Kiran Deol, Katie McCuen and Vishal Vijayakumar attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Didn't Die at the Lib...
12/03/2026
In Latin America, women are shaping music and defining its future. To kick off t...
12/03/2026
En Am rica Latina, las mujeres est n moldeando la m sica y definiendo su futuro....
12/03/2026
Let's turn back the clock 20 years: The music landscape was a world away fro...
12/03/2026
Bad Bunny is no stranger to Spotify's Billions Club. In fact, he has a whopp...
12/03/2026
Spotify was at the London Book Fair this week, joining conversations across the publishing industry about how people can make reading part of their daily lives....
12/03/2026
Mastering tool improves mono compatibility
Tokyo Dawn Labs' Ohlhorst Digital range is a series of mastering-focused plug-ins developed by Jan Ohlhorst, ...
12/03/2026
Wave FX processor integrated into four products
Lewitt have teamed up with Elgato to create a new processor for the company's Wave Next product range, i...
12/03/2026
Free tool for annotating audio files
Mix Notes is a new, free iOS App that provides users with a simple way to annotate their audio files. It's been cre...
12/03/2026
Side-chain ducking tool gets an upgrade
Devious Machines' popular side-chaining and envelope-shaping tool has just been kitted out with an improved enve...
12/03/2026
Ceremony to take place on 16 April 2026
The MPG (Music Producers Guild) have revealed the full shortlist for this year's MPG Awards, which will be takin...
12/03/2026
Emulates three classic dbx 160 variants
The latest arrival to Overloud's Gem Series plug-in range faithfully recreates not one, but three versions of th...
12/03/2026
New granular soft synth announced
Said to be their most advanced software synthesizer to date, Baby Audio's latest release has been built on a new granu...
12/03/2026
Latest version now live!
Edit 11 March 2026 - Bitwig Studio 6 is now live, and available for all to download!
The latest version of Bitwig's DAW softwa...
12/03/2026
Latest free eBook now available!
Designed for recording engineers, audio-technology students and technically minded musicians, our latest free eBook deliver...
12/03/2026
AFL and NITV partner to launch new First Nations led program Inside the Huddle&...
12/03/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity expands SITLine network encryptor portfolio - more...
12/03/2026
Rohde & Schwarz to showcase future-proof EMC testing solutions at EMV 2026 Rohde & Schwarz will participate in EMV 2026, Europe's premier trade fair and c...
12/03/2026
Johannesburg, 11 March 2026 - The 19th Annual South African Film and Television ...
12/03/2026
MELBOURNE, Fla., March 11, 2026 - L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX) and Shield AI have successfully demonstrated a first-of-its-kind integration combining L3Har...