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A2 or Assistant Audio for TV sports can be fun and profitable. Being an A2 has less pressure and is more involved on the field or court than the A1 sitting in a TV remote truck. I started doing TV remotes in the mid 1980’s working basketball, football and baseball primarily. This summer, I had the opportunity to work some pro soccer games as an A2. The booth setup for all types of sports is remarkably similar and hasn’t changed much in 40 years.

This is a typical booth setup with Play by Play, Spare and Commentator headsets, they are always in this order left to right.

Pre / Post Game and Halftime standups for commentary using hand held (stick) mics with in ear IFB (Interruptible Fold Back) for comms to the remote truck producer.

The audio setup in general is fairly easy, there are 3-4 12 pair (DT12) cables run from the truck to a stadium panel near the remote truck. Thousands of feet of cable to the broadcast booth can present a problem. The mics, IFB’s and PL (Party Line) Intercom connections are made at a panel in the booth. This takes about an hour or less to set up and the next hour is for testing and troubleshooting the bad lines. Games last about three hours so you have another five that include tear down, dinner and hanging out. I would not say that there is much an art to this as signal flow, patching, troubleshooting and handling the booth announcers in a professional manner. Getting their ear pieces in place with the stick mics in place during a commercial break can sometimes be a scramble. Many A2’s carry their own table mults (three married pairs of XLRs for headsets and Foldback) as the ones provided by the remote trucks can be dodgy. The other thing you want to have is a Whirlwind Q-Box which is basically a signal generator, headphone amp and cable checker all in one little box. If you are lucky, your A1 will be experienced, patient and fun to work with, if not, good luck!

Mixing sound for conferences, trade shows or industrials in hotel ballrooms isn’t fun, sexy or artistic but it does pay the bills. Hitting queues and flying by the seat of your pants as the corporate types, who are not experienced platform presenters, may make your hair prematurely grey. The good news is the task of riding gain over multiple mikes in a Q&A session or round table became much easier thanks to Dan Dugan.

In the early days with many simultaneous presenters, we had to rely on our reflexes to raise the mic for the person talking. If you had all of the mics up at once, they would either feedback or sound really honky. Dugan was working on this problem as early as 1970 and one day: “I was messing around with logarithmic level detection, seeing what would happen if I used the sum of all the inputs as a reference. That’s when I accidentally came upon the system. It was really discovered, not invented. I didn’t really know what I had, just that it worked like gangbusters.”

Dugan moved inside Yamaha’s QL-series of mixers in March 2014, as an option on the graphic equalizer processing page. This internal version could mix 8 or 16 microphones.

Now the Dugan plug-in is as easy as a soft patch, turn them on, turn them up and pay attention (optional).

Mixing sound through down fills and main bowls can be a great challenge. The variety of events in modern sports stadiums require the sound system to be versatile, have great coverage and adequate amplification.

It’s critical in sporting events for the attendees to hear announcements and field referee’s calls. It’s tempting to turn the field mics up too much but often less is more. Two bad things can happen if the down fills are too loud, the referee mic feeds back and they are distracted by the sound making them unintelligible. In an exciting sporting event, the crowd reaches well over 100 decibels and it is a great challenge to get the field mics over the crowd.

A well designed digital signal processor (DSP) program can be your best friend. Having capability to adjust levels of zones and eq will help you greatly as well as accommodate situations where the field is utilized for something other than sporting events like concerts, exhibitions or races.

Mixing events in stadiums can be a lot of fun and very gratifying for the audience and board op if done correctly.