Dear Santa

[Radley]

Thanks everyone. Since I'm an audio pro, maybe I'm just overly sensitive to "noise". I keep wanting to call my stage manager and tell him to get this guy off the stage... Anyway I appreciate all the responses.

The US did have for a few years the "Speed Channel" (Speedvision) where F1 was the feature of the station and that was great.

I think I mentioned it before but for one year, we had the races delayed on a regional sports TV network but the announcers were Derrick Bell and John Watson. Man, they were awesome! They went after Michael Andretti for hoping on the Concorde after (sometime during) each race. They said, man, put up a cot in the back of the factory and learn everything you can.

[NathanOlder]

See now, I really didnt like John Watson when he was on Eurosport, he was a tad boring. I think Crofty is just fine, but that may be down to the fact we had the well over the top moron James Allen and Jonathan Legard was crap. David Croft does a decent job.

It could be worse, when we get the Nascar or IndyCar here in England we hardly get any commentary as every 10mins your commentators go for an ad break and in the UK we just get the pictures with no commentary. At least the F1 Qualy and F1 race is all uninterrupted with no ads at all (how it should be)

[Just_a_fan]

James Allen. Now there was a guy you could happily see run over...made my skin crawl.

[NathanOlder]

James Allen. Now there was a guy you could happily see run over...made my skin crawl.

Yeah agreed

[santos]

Because dislike the sound of F1 cars is too much 2014, let's just dislike the sound of Crofty

[zac510]

Although I rag on Crofty's useless statistics , I don't think he's too bad. All sports broadcasts these days suffer from regurgitation of meaningless statistics.

Commentators are a bit like Presidents/Prime Ministers, there's always a certain percentage of people who will hate them regardless of how good they are!

[nevill3]

Dear Santa, please let us have the full F1 TV app coverage in the UK so we don't have to pay for SKY sports and all the other drivel you have to take to watch F1

[bill shoe]

Moderators, please! This discussion has drifted away from specific things you can see and touch on Santa, and gone into pure speculation about presents that Santa might bring in the future. This kind of speculation belongs in the Christmas thread!

[strad]

Radley, Then I assume you agree with me that they could do a lot better job with the mixer and adjusting the variousn microphone levels. Especially the car to pit levels and the backround to announcer levels?

[Radley]

Radley, Then I assume you agree with me that they could do a lot better job with the mixer and adjusting the various microphone levels. Especially the car to pit levels and the backround to announcer levels?

Yes indeed! I've thought a lot about that and I wonder what the broadcast engineers at Sky and ESPN are listening to? The FOM world feed is very good (Dolby Digital). The trackside mics are in stereo and it seems like their engineer is a fan. From FOM it goes to Sky. There it gets messed up. Forum member "DM0407" suggests turning off the center speaker. I've brought mine down -12dB just for the races, and 12dB is a huge amount. I just can't get what the Sky people are listening to. Certainly their broadcast center has a Dolby system? ESPN then takes Sky's feed and really screws it around. NBCSN did the same thing. I think they're using the Hughes box which kind of makes everything pseudo stereo. I think they assume most people listen/ watch on a phone or tablet and are scarred that the Dolby 5:1 will decode incorrectly, so they just scramble it with the Hughes box.

I just keep wondering what the Sky people are set up for. In film language, the background "sound" is called "walla". I assume that Sky enginers aren't gearheads because like you said the cars are low the announcers high and they just treat the car sounds like walla. They think that's good enough.

The car to pit audio is pretty horrid and that comes from FOM. Riedel and TATA are responsible for that.

The thing is we/ I know it can be done well. One can put up a tennis match (ugh) and hear wonderful audio.

[strad]

thanks.. Nice to know I'm not the only one that knows they could do the audio a lot better.