Broadcast decides what your stadium sounds like

The atmosphere most people experience is a mix engineer's version of it, and the mix has been getting flatter for years.

There is the noise in the bowl and there is the noise on the broadcast, and they have less in common than you would think. One is a physical event you stand inside. The other is a set of choices about microphone placement, gain and how much room the commentary needs above it.

Effects microphones live at pitch level, pointed roughly at the action. That is a fine way to capture a tackle, a shot on goal and a goalkeeper shouting. It is a poor way to capture a stand behind you singing, because that sound arrives late, reflected, and smeared by the roof. So the sung, sustained, structural part of a crowd, the part that actually makes a ground feel like something, is the part the microphones are worst placed to hear. Meanwhile the sharp, transient noise nearest the pitch is captured perfectly.

Then the mix compresses everything so that dialogue stays intelligible on a phone speaker, and compression flattens exactly the dynamic swings that make a crowd feel alive. A ground going from silence to a roar in half a second is thrilling in person. Through a compressor it is a step change in a signal that was already near the ceiling.

Venue acoustics get blamed for this and often deserve some of it. Modern roofs with absorbent linings genuinely do kill reverberation, deliberately, because a highly reverberant bowl makes the public address system unintelligible and the announcements are a safety system before they are entertainment. That is a real trade and I would take the intelligible announcements every time.

But the more interesting failure is a production one. A stadium with a hard roof and a loud end can sound extraordinary and still arrive in your living room as a wash, because nobody hung a pair of microphones high in the stand pointed away from the pitch.

Some broadcasters have started doing exactly that, and the difference is immediate.

Which leads somewhere uncomfortable for anyone who has watched a lot of football on television and formed opinions about which grounds are loud. You have not been comparing stadiums. You have been comparing microphone rigs, and the loudest ground you know might just be the one with the best audio supervisor.