The audio from your favorite events isn't real. It's much better than real.
An Olympic archer (Reuters/Alexis Madrigal editing).
When the London 2012 Olympics begin in a couple of weeks, a menagerie of sports will take over the world's TV screens. Tens of millions of people will watch archery, diving, and rowing.
Or at least we call it watching.
Really, there are two channels of information emanating from your flat screen: the pictures and the sound. What you see depends, in part, on what you hear. To be immersed in a performance on the
uneven bars, we need to hear the slap of hands on wood and the bar's
flexing as the athlete twirls. Watching sports on mute is like eating an orange when you have a stuffy nose.
For the London Olympics, Baxter will deploy 350 mixers, 600 sound technicians, and 4,000 microphones at the London Olympics. Using all the modern sound technology they can get their hands on, they'll shape your experience to sound like a lucid dream, a movie, of the real thing.
Let's take archery. "After hearing the coverage in Barcelona at the '92 Olympics, there were things that were missing. The easy things were there. The thud and the impact of the target -- that's a no brainer -- and a little bit of the athlete as they're getting ready," Baxter says.
"But, it probably goes back to the movie Robin Hood, I have a memory of the sound and I have an expectation. So I was going, 'What would be really really cool in archery to take it up a notch?' And the obvious thing was the sound of the arrow going through the air to the target. The pfft-pfft-pfft type of sound. So we looked at this little thing, a boundary microphone, that would lay flat, it was flatter than a pack of cigarettes, and I put a little windshield on it, and I put it on the ground between the athlete and the target and it completely opened up the sound to something completely different."