NBA
CLIENT BACKGROUND
The NBA is the official men's professional basketball league. Including up to 30 teams within the United states, it is the premier league for professional basketball.
The Challenge
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the live sports industry has been at a stand still. Because the industry was in need for a new way to interact with fans at home, Hearcorp was contracted to engineer a new micing system for three basketball courts for the NBA. These micing systems would be installed at the ESPN wide world of sports center in Orlando Florida. For the project to be successful, the system had to be virtually invisible, reject voices of players and coaches, easily remote controlled, and low maintenance because of the consecutive games.
THE APPROACH
With multiple goals and plenty of challenges within this project, we worked with Dave Grundtvig. Grundtvig is a senior sound designer and head mixer for turner sports and several other projects within sound design. When planning the micing system, we agreed that “contact pickups”E Shurtler or Barcus berry style piezo elements would be the only way to achieve the isolation needed to complete our goals. However, the regular manufacturers could not deliver 150 elements within the timeline except for Zepplin design labs. They were able to ship 150 piezo elements and preamp kits to our shop in Pittsburgh. Next challenge was how to assemble and prepare for installation next week.
In preparation for the installation we contacted the NBA’s floor provider. We found out there are channels running down the short side of the court that would be perfect for cable run. However the NBA is very strict on where cables could be run within their venues, so we had to rely on vectorworks drawings to map cable paths for 40 mics to prepare for the install. Additionally, We spoke to the NBA’s statistics department to figure out mic and spacing for the perfect at home experience.
After everything was planned out we began to assemble the phantom powered preamps, with XLR connectivity, that would fit under the floor, hidden from view, (and maintenance). Overnight, the Hearcorp/25 Carrick venue space turned from pandemic webcast studio into an electronics design/build space. Students from our entertainment technology program teamed with Hearcorp employees to fashion an assembly line, building, soldering, testing and QCing each part of the system to ensure a quick and easy installation.At the same time, out in our newly repaved parking lot, 7.5 miles of single pair wire was cut, labeled, terminated and bundled to exact length, so on site, installation would be seamless as the floors went down.
Next problem was the options of audio transport, mixers and control protocol. We went with Sound craft UI24 mixers in pairs for each court. They were the right price, and designed with a simple web based front end control. We were able to build a LAN that included all three venues, the “fiber farm”, and siz OB mobile units as points of control. This would make them easily controlled by a laptop. With the help of the NBA’s partner Corning, a local Orlando crewing company that provides jobs to at risk youth who are being re entered into the workforce, we were able to install three identical systems within two weeks.
TIMELINE
We had pulled this project together within weeks from bid to install at the ESPN Wide world of sports center in Orlando.
IMPACT
We reached our design goals on time and under budget, the system was so impressive that the entire system is being considered for the NCAA tournament.
