By: Cole Malone
When you’re watching sports (baseball, for example) on TV, you’re listening for that pop in the crowd, or that crack of the bat hitting the ball. Audio mixers are the people that make this possible.
They show up hours before the game starts to get to work. They place microphones all over the field. These microphones are hidden from sight, but placed near the home plate in order to generate that crack sound from the bat, along with dialogue from the umpire, benches, crowd, batter, and catcher.
Below is an example of what you would hear on TV while watching baseball:
Each sound needs its own special microphone. It gives the production team a various soundscape of gameplay to select from. There are microphones near the home plate for the bat, microphones near the bases to hear the ball hit the players’ gloves. Microphones near the dugouts.
The biggest wildcard in sound mixing at these types of sporting events are the players, especially when they’re angry. A sound mixer would specifically avoid tracking the audio of a player who just had a bad play, in anticipation that he may curse on live TV. In contrast, if a player makes a good play, the mixer will include the cheers from him and his teammates. Furthermore, mixers try and include crowd noise and cheering, but have to avoid cursing from the drunk and/or angry fans. They have to fade these fans out, while also fading out the PA system as the TV audience doesn’t need to hear every PA announcement while also listening to commentators.
There are so many different factors that go into mixing sporting events for live TV. They have to be very careful with what does and doesn’t make it through to TV. They have to alter their mixing with home and away stadiums, outdoor stadiums or enclosed domes. There is so much raw audio that comes through to the production truck, and the art of the job is to mix it all together.