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

14/02/2025

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

Print This Story | Subscribe

Story Highlights

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

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2025/02/14/nba-all-star-more-games-more-te...
	See more stories from svg

North America Stories

17/07/2026

Foundry Unlocks Professional-Grade AI for VFX with Gripta...

Creative software developer Foundry today announced Griptape Enterprise, a new tier of the Griptape AI workflow orchestration platform, extended to meet the str...

17/07/2026

Foundry Releases SmartRoto for Nuke

Creative software developer Foundry today announced the availability of SmartRoto, a new AI-powered plugin upgrade for Nuke, NukeX, Nuke Studio, and Nuke Indie ...

17/07/2026

The Final Release of Blackmagic Fairlight Live is Now Available!

The Final Release of Blackmagic Fairlight Live is Now Available! Brie Clayton July 16, 2026 0 Comments Fairlight Live is a new audio mixer designed fo...

17/07/2026

Leveraging All of Entertainment's IP

Leveraging All of Entertainment's IP Andy Marken July 16, 2026 0 Comments Nobody ever wins the games. Period. There are survivors. There\s no win...

16/07/2026

SVG Students To Watch: Kaden Sherman, Albany State University

This recent graduate and Georgia native has turned an early fascination with live production into a growing passion for camera work In the live-sports-video in...

16/07/2026

TNDV Marks First Year of Aspiration 35 Cinematic Production Truck

TNDV is marking the first anniversary of Aspiration 35, a mobile production truck built around ARRI Alexa 35 Live camera systems. Over its first year, the truck...

16/07/2026

ATSC Releases First Major Revision to A/85 Audio Loudness Recommended Practice Since 2013

ATSC has completed a major revision to its A/85 Recommended Practice: Techniques...

16/07/2026

FloSports Named Exclusive Global Media Partner for 2026 CrossFit Games

FloSports has announced an exclusive global media partnership with CrossFit for the 2026 CrossFit Games, presented by Air National Guard, beginning July 21 in S...

16/07/2026

Sennheiser Releases Spectera Firmware 1.4 and Command Button

Sennheiser has released firmware version 1.4 for its Spectera wireless system and announced the Spectera Command Button (Cat. No. 701014). The update adds comma...

16/07/2026

ESPN and Southwestern Athletic Conference Announce Multi-Year Media Rights Agreement Through 2030-31

ESPN and the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) have announced a multi-year...

16/07/2026

Audio-Technica Releases 20 Series Control Application for Elgato Stream Deck

Audio-Technica has announced the 20 Series Control Application, a Stream Deck plug-in for compatible Audio-Technica USB microphones. The application is compatib...

16/07/2026

SSL Live L550 Plus Consoles Power Audio Production for The Voice France Season 15

The fifteenth season of The Voice - La plus belle voix on TF1 used four Solid St...

16/07/2026

Gray Media and Atlanta Hawks Announce Georgia-Wide Broadcast Partnership for 2026-27 NBA Season

Gray Media and the Atlanta Hawks have announced a broadcast partnership that wil...

16/07/2026

SVG Sit-Down: Quarterback Showrunner Joe Zucco on Cinematography, Building Trust, Carrying On the NFL Films Legacy

Season 3 of Netflix's docuseries, which dropped this week, follows Jayden Da...

16/07/2026

Texas Rangers Switch Direct-to-Consumer Streaming Partner to BZZR

The Texas Rangers and Rangers Sports Network presented by Progressive (RSN) have announced BZZR as the new direct-to-consumer distributor for Rangers game broad...

16/07/2026

FIFA World Cup 2026: BBC Sport on Moving Across the Pond to Bring the Atmosphere of the Final Matches to Fans

With England's FIFA World Cup 2026 team getting ready to fly home after losi...

16/07/2026

With 36 Unilateral Cameras, NBC Sports Shapes 154th Open Championship Coverage for U.S. Viewers

In a return to Royal Birkdale, the team enjoys partnering with ETP and Gravity M...

16/07/2026

Altitude Sports & Entertainment's Tim De Lay on New SkyCam Digital Feed, Upgraded Studio Space

Along with a new studio at Ball Arena, the Colorado-based RSN is working with XR...

16/07/2026

FIFA World Cup 2026: Inside ORF's Austria-Based Production to Bring All the Emotions of the Tournament to Fans

Austria was back at the World Cup for the first time in 28 years, and the team d...

16/07/2026

Inside Gravity Media's Effort To Power the 154th Open Championship Production

With 42 RF cameras and high-power radio mics deployed, the spectrum environment ...

16/07/2026

The Gauge: Poland | June 2026

June brought stabilization to the television market. Poles spent an average of 3 hours and 36 minutes a day in front of their TV screens exactly the same as i...

16/07/2026

New studio monitoring leads Glensound's 60th year line-up...

Glensound returns to IBC with a major new addition to its intelligent loudspeaker range, the Greater Divine Supernal studio monitor, alongside recent developmen...

16/07/2026

Complete spectrum of innovation from British exhibitors a...

33 leading exhibitors are taking part in the GREAT Britain and Northern Ireland Pavilions and linked locations across IBC2026 (Amsterdam RAI, 11 14 September)...

16/07/2026

Hitomi Broadcast to showcase HDR colour verification and...

Hitomi Broadcast will introduce Spectra, a new HDR colour verification solution measured in picture, not using VPID, at IBC2026 (Hall 10, Stand A40). Expanding ...