This might belong more in MPSIMS, but I thought it would certainly be OK here.
Fake crowd noise just about makes games unwatchable for me. I’ve been muting the sound and turning on closed captioning to follow games. I’m glad I’m not deaf 'cause the captioning is not great.
I think what really bothers me is that the noise isn’t modulated as a real crowd would be. It’s just a constant static like background, even during stoppages in play. And no big cheers when something big happens.
I would really like to watch a basketball game, for example, where I could hear players calling out plays or defensive switches, etc. Or hear coaches yelling instructions or even hear the genuine cheers from a bench when something good happens.
I’m sure all sports fans would prefer to have real crowds, but in the meantime, it might be interesting to hear the actual sounds of games.
I’m not a sports watcher, so apologies if this is one of those “everyone else knows” kinds of questions, but is this a new thing, like a COVID-era thing, or has it been going on for a long time now or something?
It’s a new thing for empty stadiums in the Covid era. When baseball started I saw a couple games on TV dead silent and it was just wrong. Creepy wrong. They added fake crowd noise and it seemed like almost a normal game.
Football has been doing it too. I think they do a pretty admirable job of it, cheering when the home team scores, booing penalties, and so on. It’s so much better than a game with no crowd noise at all.
My strategy would be to use real recordings of crowd noise from old games. You’d stitch together the normal crowd noise, and use clips of them cheering/booing for similar parts in previous games. Given all the money they have, you’d use full on sound engineers–probably the same ones who handle it in video games.
Not even video games are dumb enough to just have it be the same level of noise throughout.
You don’t think the closed captioning is great? Oh it’s great. Greatly funny! Especially the hockey. You would think maybe they could get some captioners who actually knew something about hockey. Oh what they do to the names, especially the Russians. Even if the game is not so good you can have a lot of fun with the captions.
And actually, they do use actual crowd noise from actual games.
I used to have a setup where I could mute the center channel for games and would not hear the announcers. I think it stopped working when I went to HDMI. Next year, will try using the component cables. You might try that if you have a center speaker. You could unmute it if you needed an explation of what was happening in the game. Maybe it would work with HDMI if you set the TV to surround sound, not sure
Football here started with only real sounds, and the networks and teams hated it. I don’t know what the fans thought of it, but without the crowd, it sounded like Sunday club football, not pro football. Then they went with fake noise once or twice, and people pointed out that the English were doing it much better, with synchronized crowd noise. So know they’re using some kind of artificial crowd noise, that swells when there is a goal, and quietens for the bounce.
I’m not a fan, so I don’t know if it’s any good, but apparently people think it’s not nearly as bad as “no noise”, or “steady noise”.
Watched a bit of a college BB game with no crowd - it brought me back to when my boys were playing in summer leagues (where at best each kid one parent there). Somewhat surreal, hearing the ball bounce and the shoes squeak.
I particularily love it when the HOME team gets booed! Now that’s realistic. Especially if you’re the Eagles.
I also get a kick out of the fact they still play (live in the stadium) all the fan-cues, like third down ominous music, and the rally calls. (Some stadiums have hundreds of fans so for them it’s something, but some like GB still have none.) Plus they still have all the message board ads. I don’t think the players and coaches are going to to to the concession stand.
In Europe they try to make it a bit more realistic, not just a constant humming. I wonder if South Africans do the vuvuzela thing.
I wish my team was better motivated to play good football, not the crap they have been playing since… oh, I don’t know how long anymore. It’s getting painful. I would accept any kind of noise, even jodeln, if they played well again.
I like in how some footy games (the Prem) they’ll have the odd chant going.
Silence - no good - like a practice. I wanna hear more than just the coach and the keepers.
Sight derail - in the NBA, although I endorse the idea - I think it’s great - I’m still completely squicked out by the sight of all the different individual virtual screens in the crowd, with folks waving their arms and making faces and stuff. I shouldn’t be unsettled by all the different-sized faces and goofy expressions and muggings, but yeah - I sure am.
Honestly, I thought I would hate it, but I found it pretty well done. I’ve sometimes even momentarily forgotten that there was no crowd there. Listening to sports with no crowd noise just feels odd.
You are making an unwarranted assumption. Just because someone states what they would do doesn’t mean that they think that no one else has thought of it. In fact, I half expected someone to come along and say “that’s exactly what they do in [this sport]. They hired the video game people to make the crowd noise realistic.”
And the OP specifically said that the crowd noise is flat in the sports they watch, specifically citing basketball. So clearly they don’t do what I said. They clearly didn’t hire the video game people to make the crowd noise as realistic as possible. So clearly I’m not suggesting something that everyone already does.
I have to say, your response seems odd to me. We’re talking about sports here. And I’m not even saying my team or sport is better than yours. It seems an odd situation to need to walk on eggshells to avoid offending people.
It’s really hard for me to figure out exactly what I should apologize for, since the worst thing to apologize for would be “that you got offended.” So all I can say is that what you got out of my post was not remotely what I intended.
I have to agree, if someone suggests something that’s already being done it’s easy to just say “they already did that”. You don’t need to be oblivious with a massive ego because you haven’t heard or read something yet.
I’ll mention though, that the OP’s description of flat static crowd noise is at the least not ubiquitous. They absolutely do change it in many sporting events to try to make it sound like real crowd noise, with reactions and everything. So nobody could blame you for a mistaken assumption if you’re taking that statement at face value.
