NBA All-Star: More Games, More Teams, More Music, More Sound From the Court

NBA All-Star: More Games, More Teams, More Music, More Sound From the Court Turner Sports' team will deploy familiar tech to capture all the audio By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Friday, February 14, 2025 - 7:00 am

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Almost everything about the NBA All-Star Game in San Francisco on Sunday (Chase Center, 8 p.m. ET, TNT, TruTV, and MAX) will be different. The game will take the form of a mini-tournament, with four teams and three games. Two teams of eight players each will meet in one semifinal; the remaining two teams, in the other semifinal. The winning teams from the matches - the first to reach or surpass 40 points in each game - will advance to face each other in the championship game.

The format may be unconventional, but the sound will be quite familiar, with all the sneaker squeaks, ball thumps, and hoop clangs that NBA viewers have come to expect and enjoy.

That's largely due to the presence of Dave Grundtvig, senior audio supervisor, remote operations, Turner Sports. The longtime audio guru has been fine-tuning the sound and its capture for TNT Sports for much of the broadcaster's 35 years as the NBA's TV home, a run that ends with this season. (Disney's ABC and ESPN, Comcast's NBA and Peacock, and Amazon will be airing all NBA nationally televised games from the 2025-26 season through the 2035-36 season, an 11-year deal worth an estimated $76 billion.)

Submixer Alex Rohr (left) with the MXA901 mic array and Audio Supervisor Dave Grundtvig holding a Shure KSM313/NE bi-directional ribbon microphone used to create TNT Sports' NBA All-Star Game broadcast's 5.1 ambience channels

The [All-Star] format has changed to these mini games and four teams, but that doesn't necessarily affect our coverage, he says. We're trying to capture basketball sounds, and we're trying to capture audience reaction. That is front and center. And foremost, the formula hasn't changed for the tools we use to capture all that.

Standard and Bespoke Mics Those tools include the usual microphones in the broadcast-sports arsenal - long shotguns to pick up crowd noise, short shotguns aimed around the court floor for close-in sound - as well as more-specialized ones for basketball. Among the last are the custom-made contact microphones that Grundtvig developed to capture court effects during the NBA's COVID bubble in Orlando in 2020 and '21 and places under floor openings to pick up the action near each basket.

He has been deploying one other specialty transducer for NBA games, one originally developed for a very different application: microphone arrays designed for use in corporate conference rooms. Specifically, Shure's MXA710 linear microphone array, which he deployed initially for the 2022 NBA Summer League and has since deployed for NBA regular-season games and other events on TNT Sports. For the 2023 and 2024 Summer League, Grundtvig moved up to the MXA910, a planar array with more lobes and a wider pickup range, covering as much as a 20- x 20-ft. space around it. As with the 710 model, he uses Shure's firmware and software enabling the output to be grouped into separate lobes and controlled wirelessly and remotely. A pair of the units mounted vertically on the basket stanchion picks up sounds around the goal and as much as another fifth of a 94- x 50-ft. NBA court.

It's like a parabolic, but on steroids, he quips. A parabolic gives you one [microphone] output; this gives you eight. Take just the three-point [shot] arc: everything inside that three-point circle I can designate a lobe for, and it can be automixed and manipulated to capture squeaks and bounces.

Both MXA units integrate Shure's IntelliMix digital-signal processing for such applications as acoustic echo cancellation, noise reduction, automatic mixing, automatic gain control (AGC), compression, delay, and equalization. The software can also look for steady-state noise and remove it. Audio routing is controlled through a remote device on a Dante or AES67 network, and digital-signal processing is controllable from any computer on the network.

Conventional microphones are much more narrowly focused, he explains. You pick your spots where you think the action is going to be and get pretty good coverage, but you don't get the coverage that the array gives you. The auto-mix output is much faster than the human can open a mic: essentially, the array constantly has a lobe open and ready versus a human trying to open four or five microphones. The mix is definitely smoother.

Sound and Safety In addition to the extra range, the array units offer a player-safety benefit: their location about 9 ft. above the goal area and back from the basket itself means that Grundtvig can capture a of close-up sound without putting any hardware near lunging ballplayers.

That same reasoning is behind the use of Q5X's PlayerMics at the All-Star Game. Their small, padded form factors are designed to minimize injury in case of falls. They will be worn by a total of eight players during the various games, and the company's RefMics and CoachMics will be worn by two officials and two coaches.

Cue the Music Some audio novelties will be deployed. Increasingly, the emphasis at All-Star Weekend is on entertainment, and this edition will feature music performances by hip-hop artists Too $hort and Saweetie, multi-platinum vocal group En Vogue, five-time Grammy winner H.E.R., and rapper LiAngelo GELO Ball on the arena stage and Noah Kahan, The Chainsmokers, Zedd and 2 Chainz, and Flo Rida at Pier 48 throughout the weekend as part of the NBA All-Star Concert Series. Grundtvig, A1s Jason Blood (Friday and Sunday) and Jeff Walker (Saturday), submixer Alex Rohr, audio guarantee Dave Bjornson, and A2s Shaun Studevent and Jay Davis will ha

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