| By: Dan Daley, Audio Editor | Published: October 14, 2009 |
Broadcast-sports audio in surround hit a marker this year. It was 15 years ago that Fox Sports did the first national live surround broadcast for the 1994 NFL season. That milestone was noted during the Sports Video Group’s Surround Live Seven event at Manhattan Center — concurrent with a surprisingly robust AES Show at the Javits Center — in which several proponents discussed ways to standardize the surround experience without limiting it creatively.
“You always have to leave room for creativity in the mix,” said Fred Aldous, Fox Sports’ audio consultant and senior mixer, during the panel Surround Sound: How Far We’ve Come, Where We Are Going. “That’s what makes it exciting.”
Also on the panel were Bob Dixon, director of sound design for NBC Olympics; “JJ” Johnston, Neural DTS’s chief scientist; and Dennis Baxter, Olympics sound designer.
In a separate presentation, Kevin Cleary, senior technical audio producer for ESPN Event Operations, noted that his network alone does more than 3,000 sports-broadcast events per year. “Surround viewership is increasing exponentially, and what we’re trying to do is give the fan a consistent surround experience,” he told the approximately 60 attendees.
Because crowd sizes and venue geometries vary greatly from event to event, Cleary said, ESPN is combining teamwork with mentoring, having more-experienced mixers guide newer ones. The intent, when it comes to surround mixing, is to create a consistent set of best practices that do not compromise the stereo experience.
Even 15 years into it, it’s a complex proposition. What to include in the surround channel still varies from sport to sport, depending largely on the POV of the cameras.
In addition to being subjective, it’s also highly nuanced. Cleary offered the example of NHRA on ESPN. “In terms of the contrast from soft to loud, the SPL is in a class of its own,” he said. “But the in-car experience has to reflect reality: it’s not as loud inside the [cockpit] because the engine exhaust” — where most of NHRA’s fabulous noise comes from — “is vented out and away from the car.”
The solutions can be clever. Cleary noted that the phantom center channel for vocals normally created in a stereo mix could distract from the announcer’s voice in its own conventional place in the LCR array’s center channel. Here, the solution is either to request stem tracks from the artists so the lead vocal can be stripped out as a mono source and placed in the center channel as well or to upmix the content to extract the vocal for accurate placement in the mix.
In his presentation, Tom Sahara, senior director of remote operations & IT at Turner Sports, reeled off several very specific points that he feels should be part of any surround standards. They include careful placement of field-of-play microphones that capture the natural characteristics of the play, mixers’ paying attention to the level and direction of noise sources that interfere with the capture of the sounds, and avoiding too many microphones on a single sound source. This last, he explained, “can degrade the sound because of phase differences between microphones and the additive noise pickup by the multiple microphones.”
Other speed bumps on the way to a successful surround mix include the high-SPL PA systems found in newer stadiums, which raise the noise floor of the mix and further limit the mixer’s loudness and dynamic-range values
Mixers need to pay attention to the frequency spectra of effects sounds in order to keep the intelligibility of the announcers high, Sahara said, pointing out that downmixing works against the mixer by removing the spatial separation of the surround-sound mix.
The same goes for dynamics. “Intelligibility decreases as dynamic range is reduced,” Sahara added. “Squashing the mix down and limiting the dynamics to control volume, like we used to do in analog, doesn’t work in digital. Today, we need to manage the mix levels instead of processing them.”
Independent technology consultant Roger Charlesworth’s Saying Goodbye to Stereo presentation made the case for the television industry’s standardizing on a 5.1 DTVA production format for all programming, outlining the competitive importance of exploiting the full audio potential of HD and discussing cost-efficiencies of a single audio production platform.
Charlesworth also introduced the mission of the DTV Audio Group and discussed some of the group’s objectives. He was joined by Sahara to discuss creation of 5.1 DTVA training resources for both entry-level and more-advanced operators. They underlined the looming demand for trained operators to cover the transition to coverage of all sports in 5.1 and HD.
Surround sports broadcasting may be well into its second decade, but the next few months could bring far more consistency to it, thanks to this new focus on standards. And fans will notice. As Cleary put it, “You can’t ignore the surround viewership anymore.”
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