
Tech Focus: Venue Sound, Part 1 - When Sports and Entertainment Intersect, It's Not Just About the Game Audio quality has become a major factor in the fan experience By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Wednesday, April 3, 2024 - 10:40 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
Sports teams and leagues are increasingly focused on the quality of the sound in their stadiums and arenas. They have to be, because everyone else is. Consumer complaints about the quality and volume of the sound have moved to the forefront of conversations about the overall in-venue experience. Across the world, concerns about acoustics drive concerns about the emotional connection that spectators can have with what takes place on the field or the stage, and stadiums and arenas increasingly have to present both sports and music.
The market for live sports-venue sound is roughly where concert sound was 20 years ago: a cohort of ticket buyers have significantly higher expectations of the experiences they're paying for. It's not just a game anymore: it's an afternoon and evening at a venue that will likely offer music, food, betting, and other entertainment elements and often cost several hundred dollars. The sound has to match the prices and expectations. That's garnering attention from sound-system vendors and giving venue operators more options.
PK Sound's Ralph Mastrangelo: Sports venues need to accommodate entertainment, both as separate events and combined.
Sports is an exciting market to be in, and that's why I'm putting so much effort into it, says Ralph Mastrangelo, director, North American sales, PK Sound, which has had success in music and other touring markets and has begun targeting the sports-venue sector. Sports venues need to accommodate entertainment, both as separate events and combined.
One area his company seeks to leverage is increased demand for high-impact music systems that can cover the field for warm-ups and practices. Some venues will use the installed sound system for that application, although that can be overkill, pumping loud music throughout a mostly empty venue. In some cases, teams have installed smaller PAs dedicated to that specific task or deploy portable PA systems. Mastrangelo notes that PK Sound's robotic-line-array technology can shift coverage areas by robotically moving the line-array components to change coverage patterns: We believe it's a more cost-effective solution for sports venues that need to use the field for different things.
Baseball Embraces the Bass Whereas the NBA and the NFL are known for the enhanced bass of contemporary music - the Super Bowl Halftime Show's latest five outings have been anchored almost completely by hip-hop and R&B artists, from Bad Bunny in 2020 to Usher this year - baseball still only dips its toes into the pool's deep-low end. Four years ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers installed 21 L-Acoustics SB28 subs in updating its sound system's right-field tower, with three more on the left-field side - a considerable amount of low-frequency energy (LFE) for a typical MLB ballpark.
A main consideration was to keep that LFE within the park to prevent noise complaints. The concern was heightened by the stadium's use of a point-source system design, which is more typical of college-football stadiums and is intended to throw sound very long distances. Noise issues can be a bigger problem for a ballpark, where half of a team's 162 games a year are played, than for an NFL stadium, which is used a dozen or so times a year.
The subwoofers are arranged in an endfire configuration, explains Derek O'Hara, director, planning and development, Los Angeles Dodgers. That provides some critical directionality to the low end, keeping it from escaping the stadium walls and keeping the impact on the seating.
Danley Sound's Mike Hedden: Sports is about entertainment - now more than ever.
Mike Hedden, president/CEO, Danley Sound, which is prominent in the college-football-stadium sound-system market, has been advocating for baseball to embrace the bass. He cites the system Danley installed last year in Lawrenceville, GA's Coolray Field, which includes an ample array of the company's THMINI15 subwoofers. They have transformed the ballpark's entertainment value, he notes, adding that that's especially important since the venue's home team, the Savannah Bananas, are baseball's equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters.
As important, Hedden adds, is that, as part of the Atlanta Braves' development system, the bass-enhanced ballpark introduces players to that kind of music environment. [Major League Baseball] still has a built-in bias against the low end, he says, acknowledging the subjectivity of that pronouncement. Baseball stadiums usually use distributed sound systems, which are fine, but they tend to lose gas below 100 Hz. That's the technical side of it. I also think there's a sense that that's not what baseball's about. But sports is about entertainment - now more than ever.
WJHW's Mark Graham: Bass is driving system design these days, but so is speech intelligibility. Our job is to make it all sound good.
WJHW Principal Mark Graham agrees and notes that, in recent years, the consulting firm been installing more subs in ballparks, including the Detroit Tigers' Comercia Park this season. Some of baseball's seeming reluctance to fully embrace bass has to do with its sense of historical legacy as America's pastime, as well as with an emphasis on announcer speech intelligibility that has tended to make music more an underscore than a focus at games.
On the other hand, he points out, arenas have used line-array systems since music touring made them common in the 1990s. And, as more concert performances take place
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
11/06/2026
Australian Games Industry Glossary of Terms 10 June 2026
From DAU and EULA to COT and QADE, here's a list of game industry terms, industry jargon and their...
11/06/2026
Berklee's Tonya Butler Named Music Business Educator of the Year The Music Business Association honored Butler at its annual Bizzy Awards.
June 10, 2026
...
11/06/2026
Ann Mincieli to Receive Honorary Doctorate at Berklee NYC Graduate Commencement The five-time Grammy-winning engineer and producer, known for her longstanding...
10/06/2026
DAZN-owned digital-media company launches three fan-first series leaning into cr...
10/06/2026
Clear-Com has announced the appointment of Jason Dino as Southwest Regional Sales Manager USA, covering Southern California and the Southwest region. Dino joins...
10/06/2026
An 11% decrease in number of global broadcast deals reflects the organization...
10/06/2026
The Women Without Boundaries Awards recognize women whose work is advancing the future of media, broadcast, AV, workplace technology, digital experience, and re...
10/06/2026
Today is match day minus two for FIFA and HBS. On Thursday, there will be two ma...
10/06/2026
SES is supporting broadcast distribution of the world's biggest football tou...
10/06/2026
NDI has announced that BirdDog has become the first hardware manufacturer to achieve full NDI 6.3 compatibility across its complete lineup of cameras, encoders,...
10/06/2026
Vince Caputo and Scott Carter, winners of the 2026 Sports Emmy for Outstanding Post Produced Audio have been announced as presenters for the 2026 SVG Advanced A...
10/06/2026
FOX One today unveiled a slate of new product features and enhancements designed to elevate the viewing experience for fans on the official streaming platform o...
10/06/2026
Primary production partners Dome Productions and Raycom Sports once again played...
10/06/2026
The Women in Sports Filmmaking Experienceship is an immersive professional devel...
10/06/2026
The league has expanded its HSAN architecture for the NBA Finals to manage more ...
10/06/2026
The inaugural MoonPay X Games League (XGL) Winter Draft will take place Wednesday, September 16, 2026 at Cosm Los Angeles from 7-9 p.m. PT. The event will strea...
10/06/2026
The University of Oklahoma (OU) Athletics Department and Learfield have announce...
10/06/2026
The Video Services Forum (VSF) has released TR-06-4 Part 8, a new specification for RIST Satellite-Hybrid: Out-of-Band Method. The specification creates a mecha...
10/06/2026
Riedel Communications provided the communications infrastructure for the 14th World Live Neurovascular Conference (WLNC) in Lisbon, supporting live medical proc...
10/06/2026
A still from The Doom Generation by Gregg Araki (Courtesy of Sundance Institute)
By Lucy Spicer
Have you checked out our Sundance Film Festival 101 list yet...
10/06/2026
Get Hands-On with Interfaces & Mic Preamp Brands
If youre after a new interface or preamp, then GearExpo UK is the place to be! Well have a whole host of au...
10/06/2026
November 13-14 2026, The Midway, San Francisco
Following their recent rebranding, MONO Music Conference (formerly Music Expo) have officially announced thei...
10/06/2026
Debut instrument free for limited time
deFORM is the debut release from newly founded developer ebbandflow, and it's being offered as a free download fo...
10/06/2026
Alone Australia Season 4: Meet the Cast
10 June, 2026
Media releases
WATCH THE TRAILER
Smash-hit survival series Alone Australia drops its highly anticipa...
10/06/2026
DEADLY THEN, DEADLY NOW, DEADLY ALWAYS: SBS & NITV IGNITE NAIDOC WEEK 2026 WITH ...
10/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz and TRUMPF advance laser-based drone defense with THORIS LCS Rohde & Schwarz is showcasing THORIS at ILA 2026: A sovereign, end to end counter...
10/06/2026
MAHLE and Rohde & Schwarz develop application for sensor testing of modern drive...
10/06/2026
Production and Development Funding supports the creation of compelling, commercially viable, artistic and culturally relevant South African screen content. Deve...
10/06/2026
Media buyers and sellers can now compare YouTube reach from computer, mobile, an...
10/06/2026
Accedo, Humans not Robots, and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) have announced the launch of Ecoflow X. Formerly an IBC Accelerator project, ...
10/06/2026
Frequency, the engine powering the world's leading streaming television channels, today announced that James Smith has joined the company as General Manager...
10/06/2026
At the 14th World Live Neurovascular Conference (WLNC) in Lisbon, Riedel Communications provided the communications infrastructure for live medical procedures s...
10/06/2026
Globecast, a leading provider of broadcast, media, and entertainment managed services, today announced the launch of its Content Exchange platform powered by Or...
10/06/2026
Klvr will showcase how venues, integrators and production teams are rethinking disposable battery usage at InfoComm 2026 (Las Vegas, June 17-19, booth #N6311). ...
10/06/2026
The Video Services Forum (VSF) has further enhanced the Reliable Internet Streaming Transport (RIST) protocol by incorporating a new feature, RIST Satellite-Hyb...
10/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
10/06/2026
Today, Google DeepMind released DiffusionGemma - an experimental open model built for exceptionally fast text generation. NVIDIA has optimized DiffusionGemma to...
10/06/2026
A car pulls up to the curb. The app says, Your ride is here. No one's in the driver's seat. For people who live in one of the dozens of cities now hos...
10/06/2026
10 Jun 2026
VEON's Banglalink Brings Every World Cup 2026 Match to Football...
10/06/2026
Wednesday 10 June 2026
How to watch every ICC Women's T20 World Cup 2026 match live on Sky Sports
Where is the ICC Women's T20 World Cup 2026 availabl...
10/06/2026
Wednesday 10 June 2026
P RLA brings first-ever Beautifully Clean Oral Care'...
10/06/2026
Wednesday 10 June 2026
Sky reveals pulse-pounding first teaser trailer for upco...
10/06/2026
Wuppertal June 10, 2026
Riedel Artist at the Heart of the 14th World Live Neurovascular ConferenceAt the 14th World Live Neurovascular Conference (WLNC) in Li...
10/06/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Showcases New Mobile Experience, Collections and Games Vision in APAC
Product
10 June 2026
GlobalSouth KoreaJapan
Link copied to c...
10/06/2026
Back to All News
Ready to Join? The Netflix Fan Club Arrives at Cannes Lions
Business
10 June 2026
Global
Link copied to clipboard
Download all assets
N...
10/06/2026
Chemists snap together complex 3D molecules from highly reactive radicals-without losing their shape Scripps Research team develops stereoretentive radical-radi...