April 17th, 2006

Silence is NOT Golden

After what seems like a lifetime of mixing live remote sports audio, I thought I’d seen it all.

Wrong.

In twelve years, I never had a day like yesterday.

I mixed the Easter Day NBA game; Miami Heat vs. Some Other Team. The game was broadcast nationwide, and being Easter and all, it probably had a decent audience.

The first half of the game was uneventful, as most of these games are. But five minutes into the second half, things got VERY exciting. Suddenly, someone started shouting, “ABC in New York has lost our audio!”

What? Shit! You’re kidding! That’s not good… SHIT! No audio in New York is worse than not good, it’s about the worst thing that could happen. We were pretty much fucked. With the game still in progress, we had to figure out as fast as possible how to unfuck it.

But the strange thing was, I could still hear everything. The game was still happening, meters were still moving – I was still mixing. All was OK in the audio room.

And in NY, silence.

Almost immediately our announcer said, “Folks, we apologize for our audio difficulties, we are working on them.” I wonder who the fuck he thought he was telling this problem to, BECAUSE THERE WAS NO AUDIO ON ABC!

The hi-tech emergency backup system, which is program audio sent down a telephone and sounds like… well like TV through a telephone… was put into emergency use. Yep. ABC put that incredible hi-fidelity telephone audio ON THE AIR! In twelve years, I have never had to use this lousy telephone backup audio before.

My cell phone immediately started ringing. Friends wanted to let me know my show sounded shitty. (With friends like these….)

I had a truck engineer standing on top of the audio console, with his ass in my face, reaching into the back of a rack, desperately trying to reset the mysterious black boxes that take regular old, easy analog audio and change it into a bunch of ones and zeros.

STOP!!!! One thing I’ve learned, the best way to make a little problem bigger is to panic.

For the next ten minutes, which felt like much longer, people worked frantically to fix the problem, and America heard our game courtesy of Ma Bell.

After much screaming, scrambling and ass-covering, proper audio was restored to NY, the fourth quarter sounded as good as the first two, and much better than the third… and the world continued to revolve.

The problem? Without going into mind-numbing technical details, somehow a wrong button got pressed somewhere. Simple as that. In all the confusion, nobody thought to check that.

The other thing I’ve learned?

ALWAYS EXPLORE THE SIMPLE OPTION!!!

Author: frenchy

Frenchy's Rant

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Silence is NOT Golden

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