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That chant during the NASCAR interview was interesting, and not just because of what the crowd was actually saying.

First, the InfoBabe and the driver were at least 75 feet from the bleachers, maybe a bit more. She was using a hand-held mike. Don’t know if it was unidirectional or omni-directional, but the crowd sure sounded loud, especially on a mike that was being held in front of the driver’s face.

Which leads me to my other point: for the crowd to be that loud on a handheld mike, 75 feet or more from their location, something else was at work. NBC, like all the networks, places microphones in the stands and at other locations around the track, to pick up the sound of the crowd, the cars, and everything else at a NASCAR race. The inputs are mixed and balanced by the audio crew, in the production truck.

For the crowd to be that loud and clear, someone at the audio board left the crowd mikes up. Yeah, the crowd was loud, but for them to be that clear/almost drowning out the InfoBabe and the driver, they were getting a little help from the audio team.

BTW, not everyone on a major sports production is a PC lib from NYC; when I was stationed in AZ, a guy I knew was a cameraman for a local station, and did extensive free-lancing for ESPN and Fox Sports on the weekends—made more money doing that that from his full-time job. One of the audio guys on that NASCAR race might have well been a free-lancer, and he decided to leave the crowd mikes “up”