Manchester Utd hire audio experts to improve atmosphere

[purpleronnie]

http://sg.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/soccer-dirty-tackle/manchester-utd-hire-audio-experts-improve-old-trafford-135232450--sow.html

Manchester Utd hire audio experts to improve Old Trafford atmosphere

• 
  

If an RVP falls in Manchester, does it make a sound? (Getty)

It sounds like an April Fools' joke that has arrived a few days late, yet it appears that Manchester Utd have drafted in an "acoustic engineer" to improve the atmosphere at Old Trafford.

The Red Devils are frequently mocked for the lack of aural passion shown at the Theatre of Dreams: the clichés suggest the majority of the fans don't live in Manchester, while the stadium is usually filled with prawn sandwich-munching corporate guests and quiet tourists making pilgrimages to see the team they have arbitrarily chosen to follow.

Utd fans did little to disprove this reputation on my last visit, where home supporters were pretty subdued, save for chanting "United! United!" when they won corners.

The Manchester Evening News have more detail on the news that's bound to fuel the flames of mockery:

The Reds have been looking at ways of turning up the volume at the Theatre of Dreams after complaints from supporters.

[...] M.E.N. Sport can reveal that, in a move which is sure to prompt jibes from across the city on the eve of Monday’s derby, the club has contracted a sound specialist to carry out a report on the stadium.

The expert attended the Liverpool match in January and will monitor noise levels at another game before the season concludes.

The findings will then be presented to the Reds’ top brass who will decide what action to take.

The complaints appear to have stemmed from the Stretford End, which is traditionally the loudest part of the 76,000-capacity venue. Apparently, their rousing chants have been getting lost in the cavernous reaches of the Premier League's largest stadium, with fans on the other side not being able to hear them.

The club have also trialled moving away fans from their traditional cramped corner of the East Stand to the fourth tier of the behemoth Sir Alex Ferguson Stand. Yet police chiefs condemned the move as frenzied away supports could cause the upper tier of the stand to "flex".

In the interest of balance, Man Utd are supposed to have one of the loudest Premiership stadiums by decibel volume — and Champions League matches are said to be pretty lively — yet perhaps they would benefit from the invite extended by Swedish side AIK Stockholm, who have this week asked their English counterparts to come and sample the atmosphere at one of their league matches.

Or maybe they should keep out those the Johnny-come-lately fans and tourists with utterly confusing stadium directions, much like they have done at Brazil's Fonte Nova World Cup stadium.

[Jaspa]

Doesnt sound good, they might need an outright supporters transplant

[Fox92]

Even the best team in the country have poor atmosphere at home, yet they are incredible away. It's not just us, which people seem to think.

[Dan]

It's a national problem and the atmosphere's bound to be shit when the game is marketed towards whoever will pour the most money in.

[Guest kristianity77]

Put the ticket prices back down so real Riff Raff can go each week, atmosphere will soon pick up

[Dan]

It really is sad that they've actually identified the atmosphere as a problem and yet THAT is their solution.

Wow.

[marbelladave]

A long time ago, in a previous life, I was on tour with a truly shambolic reggae band. Neither the drummer, nor his roadie could be bothered to tune the kit, and the drum sound was truly awful.

My engineer (Mark) managed to borrow a Linn drum machine, pretty much state of the art in those days. Like many drum machines each sample could be triggered by an external pulse, so the drums on stage were miked as normal, their output was gated and level adjusted to provide a perfect trigger pulse and applied to the Linn.

The Linn output, beautifully recorded drum samples, were then fed to the desk and mixed as normal.

So, stoned reggae drummer hits hopelessly out of tune bass drum and out of the PA comes a beautifully recorded bass drum, courtesy of the Linn.

You can see where this is going, the crowd give a rousing chorus of "the referee's a w**nker" and out of the PA comes "come on you blues", boos turn into cheers, even for Marshall, and all is well with the world, well the KP anyway......

[Guest]

A long time ago, in a previous life, I was on tour with a truly shambolic reggae band. Neither the drummer, nor his roadie could be bothered to tune the kit, and the drum sound was truly awful.

My engineer (Mark) managed to borrow a Linn drum machine, pretty much state of the art in those days. Like many drum machines each sample could be triggered by an external pulse, so the drums on stage were miked as normal, their output was gated and level adjusted to provide a perfect trigger pulse and applied to the Linn.

The Linn output, beautifully recorded drum samples, were then fed to the desk and mixed as normal.

So, stoned reggae drummer hits hopelessly out of tune bass drum and out of the PA comes a beautifully recorded bass drum, courtesy of the Linn.

You can see where this is going, the crowd give a rousing chorus of "the referee's a w**nker" and out of the PA comes "come on you blues", boos turn into cheers, even for Marshall, and all is well with the world, well the KP anyway......

The purveyors of the 'match day experience' will love your idea.

Bagsy not mic-ing the crowd up though

[TrentFox]

A long time ago, in a previous life, I was on tour with a truly shambolic reggae band. Neither the drummer, nor his roadie could be bothered to tune the kit, and the drum sound was truly awful.

My engineer (Mark) managed to borrow a Linn drum machine, pretty much state of the art in those days. Like many drum machines each sample could be triggered by an external pulse, so the drums on stage were miked as normal, their output was gated and level adjusted to provide a perfect trigger pulse and applied to the Linn.

The Linn output, beautifully recorded drum samples, were then fed to the desk and mixed as normal.

So, stoned reggae drummer hits hopelessly out of tune bass drum and out of the PA comes a beautifully recorded bass drum, courtesy of the Linn.

You can see where this is going, the crowd give a rousing chorus of "the referee's a w**nker" and out of the PA comes "come on you blues", boos turn into cheers, even for Marshall, and all is well with the world, well the KP anyway......

Lovely story. Reminds me of a wonderful story / urban myth of when Arsenal were developing Highbury and had a mural painted at one end of the ground to disguise the building work. They identified the lack of atmosphere as an issue and had 'piped sound' of crowd chants coming from large speakers. Allegedly, one of the songs was "There's only one Tony Adams" which, one day, was playing as he was warming up at quite a high decibel level. To which the said player, supposedly on automatic pilot as he was warming up, turned round and applauded that end to acknowledge the chant ! Who cares if it's true or not !!??

[marbelladave]

Just remembered, the band concerned was 'Prince Far I and the Royal Rasses', could be damn good when they could be arsed, which wasn't often.......

Ganga consumption was on a truly industrial scale though.......

I have more 'Mark' tales if anyone is interested, a particularly good one involving Motorhead in Paris........

[VLC86]

I agree the atmosphere there is normally poor but iv been a few times due to a mate having a season ticket and sometimes it's hair raising but mainly for the big games as you would expect

[Bettsj2]

Just remembered, the band concerned was 'Prince Far I and the Royal Rasses', could be damn good when they could be arsed, which wasn't often.......

Ganga consumption was on a truly industrial scale though.......

I have more 'Mark' tales if anyone is interested, a particularly good one involving Motorhead in Paris........

Deffo

[Danno]

All the day trippers dont sing a word. Go into the Stretford end where all the diehards are and it's mental.

[marbelladave]

Deffo

Mark was, for a time one of my live sound engineers, a seriously cool dude, he was also on occasion an inventive genius......

So, once upon a time we found ourselves required to do a one off gig in Paris with, of all people, Motorhead. They were on tour somewhere in the far east but had a contractual obligation to do this gig in Paris. They flew in with the minimum of kit and we had to take everything else out from London. We were not their regular pa/lighting company, they were busy elsewhere and we offered a small fortune to get everyone out of the doo-doo, so naturally....... .

To cut a long story short we got to the gig in good time and set about setting up for the gig that evening, a sunday as it happened. Everything was going fine until we tried to power up our Midas console, which well, wouldn't. Turns out the outboard 24v power supply had failed, no power supply, no front of house desk, no gig..........

This is arguably the most important part of any PA rig, so you always carry a spare, except that this time we didn't, we had managed to leave it behind. We could probably manage with a generic 24v supply if we could find one but it was sunday afternoon and Paris was shut.

In a few hours time about 11,000 heavy metal fans would be here screaming for blood, we had to do something, and quickly. A few minutes later I am outside trying to persuade our artic driver to let us borrow the two massive 12 volt truck batteries on his F88, but no dice, he wasn't a rock and roll trucker and was having none of it.

I was just about to head off around the peripherique in search of a garage and as many 12v car batteries as my battered credit card could manage when I heard the unmistakable rumble of the PA firing up on our test tape.

Back inside I find Mark setting up the desk with an enormous and very cocky grin all over his face, the PA rocking the building, how the fook did he do that?

He took great delight in telling me, first of all he said, our spare bass amps were Crown DC300, so called because they could deliver 300 watts with a bandwidth down to DC, ie direct current. So borrow a regular PP3 battery out of a DI box, solder it across the terminals of a jack plug and plug it directly into the input of the DC300, then using a multimeter across the speaker terminals, adjust the big black level knob on the front panel until the meter reads a nice steady 24 volts.

Connect a short length of speaker cable to the amp and solder it directly onto the power supply input on the desk and job done. Great night and the rig never sounded better........

[Corky]

To cut a long story short

Really?

[marbelladave]

Really?

Thought I did quite well actually........

Didn't even tell the bit about Lemmy turning up late for soundcheck.......

[FoxesAreBlue]

This just reminds me of Phoenix Mights when they wire the whole club up to the street lights!

[BrummieFOX]

United get stick for their home support but this is the reason, the acoustics don't allow for the sound to travel. If you could hear the Stretford End properly their home support would be viewed a lot differently.

Funnily enough, acoustics of the KP came up at the FCC meeting and there was a brief mention of looking at the acoustics of the ground. Would be interesting.