• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Stereo Sporting events

R

radio lover

Back in the late 70's I can remember a couple FM stations that aired the Indy 500 would strategically place their own microphones in the front strait away broadcasting the race in stereo. The sound was fantastic! Unfortunately that doesn't happen anymore. With more FM stations going to sports, is there any sports networks offering sporting events in stereo? If TV does, why not radio?
 
Radio generally is done on the cheap. That's the effort on micing up stuff, mixing, backhaul... Pretty much at all levels. It would probably amaze listeners how even large collegiate sports is broadcast. Many sound like crap, partially due to what they are using and partially because of the carelessness of the "engineers" that are responsible for their broadcasts. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy in many cases.
 
Milo Miller said:
Back in the late 70's I can remember a couple FM stations that aired the Indy 500 would strategically place their own microphones in the front strait away broadcasting the race in stereo. The sound was fantastic! Unfortunately that doesn't happen anymore. With more FM stations going to sports, is there any sports networks offering sporting events in stereo? If TV does, why not radio?
Click to expand...

I know this is off-topic, but when I was a lad working at an all-music Top 40 station, some sales guy got the wise idea to sell the live running of the Daytona 500. And I was the board op... bored is more like it, because at some point in the hours-long yawn-fest remote I got the devilsh idea to drop in some SFX behind the sounds of roaring race cars. I pulled out the Pepper-Tanner LPs, found some car horns and snuck a few into the mix.
Never knew they ran VW beetles in the 500... ;)

Kind Regards,
David Reaves
 
OKCRadioGuy said:
Radio generally is done on the cheap. That's the effort on micing up stuff, mixing, backhaul... Pretty much at all levels. It would probably amaze listeners how even large collegiate sports is broadcast. Many sound like crap, partially due to what they are using and partially because of the carelessness of the "engineers" that are responsible for their broadcasts. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy in many cases.
Click to expand...

Engineers? Sounds high dollar to me.

Where I've worked recently, the stadium staff mounds all the "crowd noise" mics days or weeks in advance and the broadcasters just show up and plug in to the full mix.
 
Back in the 80s and 90s, when I was CE for WQYK, Tampa, we mixed the Tampa Bay Buccaneer games in Surround Sound stereo.
It was quite effective. Stereo Backhaul wasn't a problem but feeding stereo to the network was too costly. The network was 15kHz mono.
 
I remember in the day when the then AM Stereo KMOX would broadcast the St. Louis Blues hockey games in stereo. Not a big hockey fan but I would listen because it sounded great!
 
The Atlanta Braves broadcast is in stereo...and in general, they have an excellent mix overall. Sadly, the data compression on their satellite channel adds artifacts that make it sound like a bad mp3. I put a low pass filter on their receiver outputs around 10khz because the artifacts drive me nuts.
 
The Cincinnati Bengals football broadcasts were fed in stereo at one point. I'm not sure if they still are.

I've thought about doing this with high school football just for grins, the LPFM I help with uses a Comrex Access and it would be easy to switch the encoding to a stereo mode.
 
When WVLK Lexington was the University of Kentucky net control a second line was established for a stereo feed. Since the facility was across the street this wasn't a problem. The engineer placed a microphone at each basket. The stereo feed was only for WVLK AM and FM as the rest of the network received mono.
 
There's alot one could do to spice up even crummy sounding mono remotes. When the remotes were on weekends and the production room was not being used, I used to take the mono feed and run it thru a stereo graphic EQ and set the channels in a somewhat complimentary "comb filter" type of setting and then run that through a stereo reverb and hard pan those outputs right and left and mix that signal way down behind the original mono feed before bringing the whole mix back into the air studio for broadcast. I could even make mono music from club remotes sound like stereo. A little creativity goes a long way towards overcoming technical obstacles.
 
Safeco Field (Seattle Mariners) provides an ambient crowd feed, including a couple of parabolics behind home plate for bat sounds. The feed is in stereo and is available in all of their broadcast booths. It's reasonably dynamic enough that you can process it to suit your needs. Sounds very good.
 
The best broadcasts I remember were the ones created in the studio. Years ago, KRKO did baseball game re-creations. Sounded real except the audio quality was much better.
 
Bill Wolfenbarger said:
The best broadcasts I remember were the ones created in the studio. Years ago, KRKO did baseball game re-creations. Sounded real except the audio quality was much better.
Click to expand...

That would have been fun to watch. I assume you probably worked with Shirley, when you were there? From what I understand, she'd been there about as long as the paint. ;D
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom