This coming season will be the third year in a row that NBCSN ("NBC Sports Network") has the broadcasts rights for Formula One in the United States.
The world feed from FOM is in the High Definition video format with Dolby Digital 5:1 audio. "5:1" stands for the five audio channels: Left, Center, Right, Left Surround & Right Surround. The "1" stands for Low Frequency Extension or more commonly known as the Subwoofer. The FOM broadcast crew places their microphones (and video cameras) around the circuits which is mixed down in the FOM broadcast truck. Typically the FOM audio mix is a "mix-minus" which doesn't utilize the Center channel. That is reserved for the different countries to insert their own announcers into their own broadcast. Thus, wherever anyone watches a Formula One race, they should be seeing the same high definition picture with Dolby surround sound and with the announcers in their native language. Here in the United States, NBCSN will broadcast Free Practice 2, Qualifying and the race. FP1 & 3 are available through NBCSN's website, which there are no announcers or commercial breaks. It is just the "raw" world feed. It looks and sounds extremely good.
NBCSN however messes with the audio portion of the FOM feed. It is not the Dolby 5:1 but some kind kind of "down-mix" that isn't even stereo. It might be ok if you were watching Formula One on a cell phone but on my 5:1 system it's absolutely horrendous. This is inexcusable.
In the old days, one could look in the phone book and find the phone number and call NBC Engineering directly. Today, forget it. You can "tweet" the announcers, but that would accomplish nothing. Am I being cruel and singling out NBCSN? I don't think so. Formula One is the premier auto racing series. It is the highest level. I expect a very good presentation. Heck, I pay a premium to receive the broadcasts. The other racing series' in the USA sound pretty bad too. Indy car and NASCAR also are butchered, but then again my expectations are also lowered. On most of the broadcasts, the audio engineers use "high pass filters" on their track side microphones. That means when you see a big NASCAR stocker V8 lumbering down pit lane there's very little bass coming through at home. When you're at the track, it's earth shaking.
Before NBCSN, Formula One was on the Speed channel, which sounded pretty good. Watching FP2 from Monaco was absolutely glorious with the cars echoing off the buildings (in my opinion, the sound from the Free Practices is more "open" than the races, as there are many times where there is just a single car or two on track so the audio isn't "hitting" the audio Limiters as hard as during the races when all the cars are on track).
The sound of the Formula One cars is supposed to be louder this year with changes to the waste gate regulations, but sadly, thanks to NBCSN, I don't think I'll ever know.
End notes:
The track closest to me is Sears Point/Sonoma/Infineon. They have NHRA, NASCAR, Indy car & Pirelli World Challenge. At the track, all of these cars sound great.
NBCSN has "dumbed down" their broadcasts of Formula One. It feels to me that the announcers have been told not to get technical. Steve Machett (ex Benetton mechanic) used to talk about the technical innovations going on. Now they just have him say Pirelli has brought the soft & medium compounds. Leigh Diffey feels he has to fill every second of silence with endless drivel about other sports. David Hobbs is still great but I miss Bob Varsha and John Bisignano. All of this I can live with if at least the F1 cars came thundering through my living room. I know how good it can be. I remember sitting on my couch one day reading the latest Mix magazine. There was an article about NBC doing the up coming Olympics from China. They quoted the NBC engineer in charge of audio that the sound mixed in the truck at the event would be the sound you'd hear at home. There was some talk of bits and dBfs that I won't bore you with, but I thought that sounds cool. So I fired up my system and found that right at that second, there was a qualifying match of women's volleyball being broadcast live. I tuned it in and was stunned by how good it sounded. It seemed like it was just a microphone in each corner of the gym. You'd see someone run on the top left and you could hear her tennis shoe squeak on the floor coming out of my left speaker. But not only that, you could hear that squeak echo through the other loudspeakers. Like a "sound field". Like it's supposed to!
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