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 ...
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...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
29/05/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
29/05/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent ratings news and is derived from press re...
29/05/2026
The days are getting longer, the temperatures are rising, and playlists are filling up for the season. With summer around the corner, Spotify's global edito...
29/05/2026
New retro-inspired MPC announced
There are few devices that have gained the status held by Akai Pro's MPC range, and in recent years, the company have s...
29/05/2026
Save up to 30 on acclaimed titles
Following a successful launch at Superbooth 2026, Bjooks have revealed that they will be continuing the Kickstarter campa...
29/05/2026
Binaural monitoring application improved
Genelec have just released an update that brings some powerful new features to their HRTF-based binaural headphone ...
29/05/2026
6 June 2026 at SAE Institute, London, UK
IMSTA FESTA 2026 is almost upon us, with some of the biggest names in pro-audio set to descend upon SAE Institute i...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, died April 12, 2026, at his home in...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Comparing 5 AI Video Enhancers for Restoring Old Video Quality
Kate Luvis May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Digitizing VHS, MiniDV, and other legacy formats doe...
29/05/2026
Studio Hamburg Builds New Post Pipeline with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Workflow replaces a patchwork of legacy tools...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
At the Intersection of Music and Dance, an Epic Collaboration Boston Conservatory musicians and dancers found creative parallels in their recent performance o...
29/05/2026
May 29 2026, 09:00 (PDT) Dolby and rednote Bring More Immersive Storytelling to...
29/05/2026
Something fundamental has shifted in how people consume media. Audiences aren't abandoning television or radio content; they're just expanding how, wher...
29/05/2026
Youtube exclusive special drops today
Watch now
UKTV today announces another e...
29/05/2026
Back to All News
The Official Trailer of Physical 100 Italy, on Netflix From Se...
29/05/2026
At just 20 years old, Sean Melia from Summerhill Co. Meath has been revealed as the winner of Super Garden 2026. Sean is the youngest ever contestant and winner...
29/05/2026
Experimental HIV vaccine achieves a long-sought goal In a first for the field, all non-human primates given a new series of vaccines generated antibodies capabl...
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 
