Olympic Swim Team Trials Put on a Show at Lucas Oil Stadium The event posed new challenges for in-venue sound, broadcast audio By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Monday, July 8, 2024 - 11:22 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
In yet another example of the event-ization of once-routine sports activities, last month's highly watched U.S. Olympic Team Trials - Swimming followed the NFL and NHL Drafts from business-as-usual to business-as-spectacle. The qualifying tryouts, which had been held at Omaha's 14,000-seat CHI Health Center Arena for the four previous trials, were moved this year to Indianapolis's Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the NFL Colts. The move more than doubled the seating capacity, even after the gridiron was converted into a pair of Olympic-size swimming pools: a 10-lane, 50-meter competition pool and an L-shaped warmup pool with intersecting 50-meter and 25-meter lengths.
It was the first time the trials, which took place June 15-23, were held in an NFL stadium, which itself follows a recent trend in which regular-season NHL and NBA games have also moved from arenas to stadiums.
In addition to the indoor sports events, the trials featured USA Swimming LIVE, an outdoor music event with DJs, bands, and presentations all week between trials sessions.
Along with record crowds on hand, the trials logged a 20% increase from the 2021 trials, averaging 3.2 million primetime viewers across NBC and Peacock, according to early numbers. The first two days of the diving trials averaged 2.9 million viewers in primetime, an increase of 39% from the overall 2021 trials average.
The live side of the extravaganza was expected to create event-level numbers, too. The nine-day series was predicted to generate more than $100 million of economic impact locally, according to the Indiana Sports Corp.
It is on a scale with an NFL Draft, says Caleb Cassler, senior audio specialist, Dodd Technologies, which provided the live sound for this year's and previous years' swimming trials and also supplied all the LED, lighting, scenic, and rigging for the event.
Testing the Waters These large events bring with them new challenges for audio, not least of which is how to manage a fluid surface that's more reflective than a football field but certainly less so than a hardwood basketball court.
Dodd Technologies' Caleb Cassler: The [goal] was to keep audio intelligible for the swimmers while not ruining NBC's nat sound.
[Water] actually reflects pretty well, Cassler explains. I wouldn't say the water itself is a huge acoustical issue, just an obstacle [to negotiate]. The design of the PA system is to try to keep everything away from the pool unless I want it there. The purpose of keeping the sound controlled around it was to keep audio intelligible for the swimmers while not ruining NBC's nat sound.
Lucas Oil Stadium's JBL VLA installed PA system was augmented with additional Meyer Sound loudspeaker components for the swimming trials. This was done to convert the typical line-array design of the installed sound system into a distributed-system design, creating highly specific individual audio zones for certain areas: warm-up pool, first-call, athlete entrance, athlete lounge, and massage room as well as underdeck elevator positions, VIP sections, starting blocks, and athlete-seating areas.
All the areas would be part of the broadcast and/or the in-venue production, which was shown on a 75-ft. LED screen that served as backdrop to the main pool. Each zone required a set of loudspeakers and separate groups/auxes on the front-of house mix console that controlled all the various mixes for the house and sent selected feeds, such as poolside interviews with swimmers, to the production truck parked outside.
Additional speakers created the distributed-sound effect that kept sonic energy focused on crowds and events and away from reflective surfaces.
We had to do a lot more speaker locations to try to segment the space, so it's not just a big acoustic mess everywhere, Cassler says. I basically could control audio in most of the rooms that had any sort of swimmer in it from my console.
Fluid Acoustics The stadium's interior is naturally reflective, and its acoustics were somewhat compounded by the pools and their water, although that was partially mitigated by a 320-ft.-wide by 120-ft.-tall drape bisecting the field. Nonetheless, indoor announcements had to contend with reflections that created an approximately 250-ms delay from the PA and caused a disorienting echo for the announcers.
The in-venue production was shown on a 75-ft. LED screen overlooking the main pool at Indianapolis's Lucas Oil Stadium.
Swimming events are very dynamic shows, Cassler explains. The place goes from perfectly silent when the athletes are on the blocks to a deafening roar when, say, a record gets broken. And everyone - the audience, the swimmers, the announcers - had their own demands for the live sound. The warmup pool, first-call room - all those rooms have PA in them, but they also needed to have a particular feel in terms of content and volume. Then there's the last-call room, which didn't have speakers but was open to the main area so [the swimmers] could hear the crowd and announcements and music through the doorway as they got ready to enter. I spent a lot of time walking around and adjusting delays between all the systems to try to have the audio focus guide you to the next place. Every area was very particular, and the console routing was very, very flexible, which it needed to be for this.
Cassler managed the entire in-venue audio from a DiGiCo SD12-96 console, which was also used to provide isolated feeds to broadcast as well as specific mixes for various areas of the venue. It was also deployed to manage the venue production
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Olympic Swim Team Trials Put on a Show at Lucas Oil Stadium The event posed new challenges for in-venue sound, broadcast audio By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
