The 125th U.S. Open: Golf Tournament Stimulates Innovation in Sound Drones are a growing part of the action By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Thursday, June 12, 2025 - 7:00 am
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NBC and USA Network will broadcast the 2025 U.S. Open Championship golf tournament (June 12-15 at Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania), with coverage also available on NBC's Peacock streaming service. It will mark the third era of the broadcaster's long association with the event - the penultimate year of its most recent rights deal with the PGA - and a new level of sonic innovation for the sport's sound.
It is Jim Deason's first year as lead A1 for the Open on NBC, but he spent most of the past six as the backup/relief mixer for the previous golf A1, Florian Brown, and as lead mixer for another dozen-plus golf shows on NBC and for broadcasts of the upstart LIV golf organization and, before that, for studio shows on Golf Channel. In that time, golf's broadcast audio has added new dimensions, from wired caddies and microphones in the holes to overhead drones, some of which have made it to the normally staid PGA's stage (drones are now in their second year).
It has been quite an evolution of golf's broadcast tech, says Deason. He and submixer Lawrence Cirillo, another veteran of the event, will be working from NEP ND2 A, B, C, and D units and Supershooter 4 A, B, and C - all ST 2110-ready trucks, making the signal connections and distribution easier. Well, easier for us, he notes. It's a lot of work for the [truck chief] engineers, but they're already there working on that and making it go. And because we used those same trucks last year, a lot of the integration hurdles are already addressed, so it should be a little bit more plug-and-play. Those are really nice trucks, and they have great staffing.
Microphones as Cornerstones Microphone choice and placement are the cornerstones of a golf sound stage. Most mics, usually stereo Audio-Technica AT4029's, are placed on par-4 and -5 tees; par-3 tees will get a pair of mono mics, usually Sennheiser shotguns, on either side of the tee.
A1 Jim Deason: There's a lot of ground to cover in golf, and a lot of sound to go with it.
Lawrence has developed this technique with dual miking on each side, Deason explains. If a golfer is setting up toward one side of the box versus the other, we can get a little bit more of that caddy/player conversation, which happens more on a par-3, just because they're hitting directly into a hole. It gives us an opportunity to have a little bit more proximity to them. Par-3s also have hole-in-one potential - a huge roar potential, especially on big events like at U.S. Opens or Ryder Cups. For those kinds of shows, it gives us a big feel.
The greens are approached similarly, with dual-mono Sennheiser and A-T shotguns, such as the BP28L, placed in what they expect the landing zones will be, based on the greens' topographies, and with locations chosen in part for their relation to the pin, plus the audio crew's experience with the course and the sport.
You don't want to put the mic at the pin, he says, because [golfers] may not be aiming for the pin on a hitting into a particular green, based on tiering on the green and the way the ball would move as a result. You're relying on experience to put those mics in places that make the best sense to hear the landing, to hear that plop when the ball hits the ground and rolls towards the hole.
In between, as many as a half dozen of the wired bunker cameras are also fitted with microphones to pick up both dialog and ambience as the play progresses from tee to pin.
(Golf-course microphone-location strategy would be instantly understood by Robert Trent Jones or Tom Doak. Or for that matter, by Fredrick Law Olmstead, whose crowning achievement, Manhattan's Central Park, was once surveyed as a possible set of links by a pair of financiers.)
Then there are the birdie mics. No, not the one-below-par shots but the avian critters whose chirps, chitters, and tweets make up a large part of golf's on-air ambient underscore. A2s will search for the quietest parts of the course (not that easy, given the nearby train line) to lay out several of these. They'll also be used to capture the outdoor equivalent of room tone - 30 seconds or so of prerecorded environmental sounds that can be patched in to cover undesired noise or too much silence.
That is something that we keep in our hip pocket and use as needed, Deason says. We like to rely on the live sound more, but you do utilize that kind of thing when you have to. It's clean and can be used to supplement [the ambience] for consistency.
The show is mixed in 5.1 surround, so the team will tend to push crowd mics - usually A-T 4029 stereo shotgun or 4050 large-diaphragm condenser - to the rear. It really opens up that sound quite a bit, he notes.
Drone Enhancements, Challenges Drones have become one of the PGA's innovative wrinkles, one that Deason says both the league and the broadcasters have embraced. After the concept's debut at the Travelers Championship on CBS in late June last year, the PGA TOUR's live-drone tracer technology has quickly become a fixture, even as it has continued to evolve. Last year, the PGA announced AR smart tracing, in which a camera drone tracks the path of tee shots; the illustrated ballistic path now changes colors based on where the ball is expected to end up.
That took zero time to make the shift into the PGA, says Deason. They were like, That's spectacular! I want to say, within six months, we were doing it on NBC.
But drones do pose challenges, particularly motor and propeller noise. That has been solved mainly by keeping the drones at greater distances and
