2020 in Review: A Singular Year for Sound In a time of immense challenges, audio technology and people proved innovative and resilient By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Thursday, January 7, 2021 - 7:00 am
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Unbelievably believable. That's how former Washington signal-caller and current Ravens QB Robert Griffin III described his Heisman Trophy win in 2011. Nine years later, the contradictory phrase aptly describes how the 2020 season played out and COVID-19 silenced the fields, tracks, and courts of world sports. It was unbelievable, but the unreal quickly became all too real, with professional, college, and high school sports struggling to find ways to play games without literally killing the players.
It set the stage for the audio story of the year, likely the audio story of the decade: how - or even whether - to re-create the sonic emotion of fans in the stands, both on the field and on the air.
Over There The UK was first out of the gate with what would euphemistically become known as enhanced sound. Sky Sports, BT Sport, and the BBC worked with FIFA 20 creator EA Sports, which drew on 1,300 content assets to create a suite of club-specific crowd sounds designed to mimic the in-venue atmosphere of a match. Dubbed EA Sports Atmospheric Audio, the audio files were tailored to each team and stadium and mixed for broadcast by engineers familiar with both.
During the pandemic, Sky Sports deployed enhanced crowd sounds for broadcasts of fan-free Premier League matches.
European broadcasters took the initiative further: Premier League games could be viewed with or without the artificial crowd noise, depending on the channel selected. For example, crowd noise was a feature of games broadcast on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Pick. Sky Sports Premier League, on the other hand, eschewed artificial sound, allowing the shouts of players in empty venues to accompany the commentary. Viewers of Premier League matches on BT Sport had the option to turn the crowd noises on or off via the network's red button feature.
However, European football, whose crowds were largely banned from venues, never warmed to the idea of pumping enhanced audio through venue PA systems. In the U.S., the much wider variety of broadcast sports made for a smorgasbord of approaches to audio on-air and in the stadiums and arenas.
Over Here The NBA was the first U.S. league to deploy a significant crowd-sound system: a multi-speaker PA focused on the courts at the Walt Disney World's Wide World of Sports complex near Orlando. With the advantage of a highly controllable environment, a bubble that brought 22 teams to a single location to keep COVID out, the in-venue sound could be fine-tuned on an almost daily basis.
In a bubble at Wide World of Sports complex, NBA kept players safe from COVID and provided fine-tuned venue sound from archived matches.
The sounds used were an amalgamation of audio tracks from previous NBA games and audio tracks captured by Firehouse Productions, an audio vendor for league special events, such as the All-Star Game. The sounds drew praise for their authenticity. However, the execution of playing those sounds -by up to three crowd-sound mixers, many of whom had never mixed for television, and by audio producers balancing the choice of audio files and intensities ranging from muted annoyance at a missed free throw to a winning 3-pointer at the buzzer - left some room for improvement.
Firehouse Productions VP Mark Dittmar attributes that to the novelty of artificial crowd sounds and to the fact that the system was developed and implemented on the fly in barely four months.
The NBA's solution was radical also in that the enhanced audio was both sent directly to broadcast and pumped through venue PA systems installed specifically for that application. It was the first time that athletes would hear the artificial fan sounds (which complemented a visual component: fans at home using the Microsoft Teams app populated hundreds of square feet of video displays lining two walls of the court).
Other sports created their own versions of enhanced sound for games. MLB, for instance, began its restart with a self-developed system using sound files from videogame developer San Diego Studios, a branch of Sony Interactive Entertainment. Most games were played in teams' own stadiums (the shortened schedule was jiggered to minimize travel), and broadcasts were backhauled to the league's Studio 3 in Secaucus, NJ. West Coast games were routed to Fox Sports' Pico facility in Los Angeles under the remote-production rubric of Home Run Production (HRP). Broadcast-audio flypacks were set up onsite.
Arizona Diamondbacks' Chase Field was the first MLB stadium to experiment with fake crowd noise.
We can control up to eight faders remotely from either Secaucus or Pico, explained lead A1 Joe Carpenter during the season. We can mix local elements, like IFBs and anything else that needs to be done in real time through the GUI. Then everything else gets muxed back to the studios.
Announcers were scattered throughout the country, working from their homes or nearby voice-over studios via a variety of video codecs, such as Zoom and WebEx. MLB mandated a single television feed per stadium, to be used by the home broadcaster with the equivalent of an international feed available for the visitors' broadcast; one or two visitors' cameras were permitted, depending on the venue.
For postseason play, though, MLB switched to a strategy more like that of the NBA, bringing teams to two stadiums, in California and Texas. It also brought in another vendor for enhanced sound, Sonofans, whose mixers were able to work remotely from the broadcasters' studios instead of having to be at the venues, further reducing exposure to contagion
