Why does speaking through a microphone sometimes give an echo that renders the PA audio useless. Eg a priest in a large church, or sports figure interviewed after a game in a stadium.
Compare that to a band at a concert, and the sound is perfect. You’d think the sports media could fix their audio for their interviews.
In: Other
* Short Answer:
* During a concert, the mics are all behind the PA system.
* During an on-the-field post game interview, the mic is in front of the speakers.
* Nationally broadcast sports employ some of the top level audio engineers on the planet, if there was a better fix to this problem, they would have found it by now.
* Longer Version:
* To start with, doing audio of any kind in a stadium is incredibly hard.
* Even during concerts there is lots of reverberation that can make the sound really bad.
* Most concert goers in stadiums are packed onto the field level where they are blasted by huge speakers that help to drown-out the reverberations.
* Once you start getting into the stadium’s normal seats, the sound gets worse and worse.
* And again, all the microphones are physically behind these speakers. There is very little PA sound that gets back into those mics because nearly all the speakers are pointed away from the stage.
* Compare that to a sporting event that uses the stadiums PA system. (Concert PA systems are brought in for each show and are almost totally separate from the stadium’s PA system).
* Those are setup so that everyone in the stadium can hear, which includes the field and all the seats.
* 90% of the time, the audio fed into a stadium’s PA is music playback and an announcer in a sealed up booth.
* There is very little bleed from the PA back into the announcer’s mic.
* Even still there is a lot of reverb and echo that happens from the announcer’s voice.
* They are trained to speak slowly and in small clumps to make this easier for the fans to understand.
* Viewers at home don’t notice because they are listening to the TV commentators who’s voice almost never goes into the stadium’s PA.
* In fact that only time it does, is for those end of playoff game style interviews OP is talking about.
* So it’s not a question of the sports audio folks not doing a good job, it’s just there isn’t a way to avoid it.
* Source: I was a professional audio engineer for many years.
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