MLB Speedway Classic: Capturing Crowd Sound in a Venue Where It's Usually Overpowered

MLB Speedway Classic: Capturing Crowd Sound in a Venue Where It's Usually Overpowered Audio team uses rain delay to fine-tune the sound By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 - 7:00 am

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Continuing baseball's recent and innovative annual practice of playing one regular-season game in an unconventional venue, this past weekend's MLB Speedway Classic at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee broke some new ground - literally. The NASCAR track was reconfigured for baseball, accommodating an MLB record attendance of 91,032 and a pregame concert featuring Tim McGraw, Pitbull, and Jake Owen.

However, the rearrangement of walls and grandstands caused FOX Sports A1 Joe Carpenter to do some rejigging of his own. He faced the unique challenge of capturing crowd sound for a sport that thrives on it in a venue for a sport that usually overpowers it.

The distance between stands and field challenged the audio team when Bristol Motor Speedway became an MLB ballpark. (Photo: Earl Neikirk/Neikirk Image)

The crowd was pretty loud, he says, but they were also farther away than they would have been in a baseball stadium. It created some strange effects.

Synchronization was one issue: similar sound sources arriving from different locations at different levels to a single microphone can create phase and other issues. For instance, the stadium's permanent seating was used as right-field and center-field bleachers that were farther away than in a typical baseball park, and temporary grandstands were added along the first and third baselines and out into left field.

Crowd sounds from that seating took longer to reach their microphones than the crowd sounds licked up by the stationary parabolic mics behind home plate and along the baselines. Carpenter says he had to give precedence to the latter, since they also capture the bat cracks and mitt pops of the home-plate area, two of the game's signature sounds. He couldn't change the temporal relationship of the disparate sound sources but, instead, moved the distant crowd sounds further into the surrounds of the broadcast's 5.1 soundfield, mitigating the disparity.

The Rain Actually Helped Those distant seating areas had their own capture issues. Carpenter used a combination of an Audio-Technica AT-4050 large-diaphragm condenser mic and a Sennheiser 418 shotgun there. Normally, he says, he would rely on the stereo 4050 as the main stereo source for that part of the park, adding the shotgun to help bridge the racetracks' larger distance. But the game's rain washout on Saturday gave him an opportunity to reconsider how they were deployed: instead of facing toward the crowd, they were turned 180 degrees and used as the batter's eye position, which produced a much better sonic outcome.

[The microphones] were so far from the center-field seats that I wasn't getting any crowd from them, he explains. The next morning, I had [the A2] turn them around 180 degrees, completely opposite. It's rare but it happens: you get rained out, but it gives you a chance to make the kind of radical adjustment you never otherwise would have.

A Matter of Reflection Among other challenges were the venue's many hard surfaces, including the track itself. That was not unexpected for the concert portion of the event - a feed from the live mix was sent to FOX Sports - but music played during the game, such as for batter walkups, or spikes in crowd reaction to batters' names did cause additional reverberation. The only solution was constant fine-tuning of the inputs around home plate.

Saturday's rain delay did create lots of opportunity for player chatter - a total of 14 player and coach mics were available to capture a wide array of on-field and in-dugout audio content, heard on replays. By Sunday, though, the focus was on the game, which was a regular-season match with both the Braves and the Reds in the Wild Card hunt. No players, however, wore an IFB, so any dialog was one way.

Notes Carpenter, Everybody was just more about getting the game in at that point.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2025/08/06/mlb-speedway-classic-capturing-...
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