Loud and Fun Is the Goal for NCAA Tourney Audio

A1 Dave Grundtvig and his team deploy plenty of mics to capture the sounds and energy from the stands as well the court

March Madness is a tournament in which the crowds and the bands are as much a part of the competition as the athletes. And nowhere is that more evident than in the audio for the games.

What fans will hear for 67 games on CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV, as well as on the NCAA March Madness Live app, will be raucous rounds of roundball, culminating Monday, April 6 in the Men's Championship game on TNT at Indianapolis's Lucas Oil Stadium.

A1 Dave Grundtvig: I try to capture the energy and the crowds and the bands with music-friendly microphones. Every game will be a little bit different, but they'll all share a healthy dose of crowd and band sound, which is what A1 Dave Grundtvig and his team at TNT have set up for their first games March 19-21 at Buffalo, NY's KeyBank Center.

The morning and evening sessions will move between networks, but we're set up for everything, he says. The big emphasis is on the energy and ambience, the fans, the bands, to capture the madness, if you will.

One of the many mics being deployed by the TNT audio teamThat calls for a lot of microphones, placed over the stands and the bands. Grundtvig has deployed an array of them, including Shure VP88 stereo microphones in mid-side configuration over the bands, as well as Shure KSM32 large-diaphragm cardioid-condenser microphones for the crowd sounds - in larger numbers, he says, than for a typical NBA game.

There's just that many more places the sounds are coming from in March Madness, he notes, and the energy is much hotter.

In addition, Grundtvig has placed a combination of six KSM32s and Shure KSM313 ribbon mics to pick up room ambience. Closer to the action, he has taped a custom-made piezo transducer to the court under each basket station, to pick up ball bounces, sneaker squeaks, and other vibrational sounds in the scoring areas. (These are the same mics he developed for the now-legendary NBA bubble in Orlando during the league's crowd-light COVID season.) These, he says, pick up the sound within 8 ft. or so of the basket. The feed goes directly into the Calrec Artemis console aboard the Game Creek Columbia mobile unit, assigned left and right in the surround mix.

As per NCAA rules, there are no microphones on players. The league also has restrictions on certain placements, such as no mics near the scoring table.

Grundtvig's team comprises his son Nickolas Grundtvig, who manages RF; Dave Bjornson, handling announcer microphones; and Dave Perry, mixing effects.

The March Madness audio team: (from left) Dave Bjornson, Dave Grundtvig, Nicholas Grundtvig, and Dave PerryDave Grundtvig has done this before, and his setup has been refined over decades of college games. However, he looks forward to the real variables on these productions.

It is kind of business as usual, he says. I mean, I've developed a formula that works, and I try to capture the energy and the crowds and the bands with music-friendly microphones. But, when there's a good game and the fans are really, really into it, in some respects, sometimes the basketball is almost secondary. Then it becomes all about everyone having a lot of fun - including us.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/03/19/loud-and-fun-is-the-goal-for-nc...
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