Here’s why it sounded like the real crowd:
“”I’m a live audio engineer. This was NOT a broadcast thing. This is my perception of what happened. I posted this on the Pat’s group on Usenet. This is a cut and paste.
The Colts have microphones placed in locations around the stadium. They are probably somewhere in the domed ceiling. They would be directional shotgun mics and aimed at the crowd. They would be best aimed at the top half of the seating so as not to pick up any field noise. When the opposing team is on offense and before the play starts when the QB is calling signals, the house, (Colt’s), engineer turns up these mics and feeds them through the stadium’s sound system. This is much better than pre-recorded crowd noise because it is a perfect audible match to the environment and there are no recordings of crowd noise to get busted with.
What happened tonight was the engineer turned up the mics too much. This caused the mics to pick up the sound eminating from the stadiums sound system, (the amplified crowd noise), as well as the natural crowd noise. The result is a feedback loop. As this loop continues to cycle through the mics and speakers oscillation occurs. This was described as the skipping sound. At this point the feedback is full bandwidth. This means that all of the frequencies being reproduced by the system were present in the loop. If you listen carefully to the recording you will hear a midrange frequency starting to become predominant. It sounded like something between 600hz and 800hz was starting to take off. At this point the engineer became aware of his error and shut off the mics. That was the abrupt drop in volume that is also on the recording on the PFT site.
If this was an accident with one of the ref’s mics, field noise would have been pumped through the system such as player’s voices. So I don’t think that this a possibility anymore.
I’m practically positive that the Colts were up to no good. Any audio engineer with a half of brain will recognize that sound. That includes the multitude of engineers on NFL payroll. I doubt anything will come of it. It would be a massive scandal for the league’s pretty boy team and a member of the CC. We’ll see what Goodell is made of now. He’d have to have the stadium physically inspected and chances are that the mics are removed after any games. What is good is that Goodell and others will now be listening more intently and this may be enough to make Polian back off and stop using them. IMO the Colts are cheaters.”"
