Sacramento, CA (May 22, 2018)—Baseball is the national pastime, but at Sacramento’s Raley Field, catching a game is mainly about having a good time. Home to the Triple-A league Sacramento River Cats, the venue uses every trick in the book—and plenty of technology—to keep the fans entertained. Most of that responsibility falls into the hands of entertainment coordinator Trevor Levine, who looks after everything attendees see and hear other than the gameplay itself, so at the season’s start, he installed a QSC TouchMix-30 Pro compact digital mixer as the ballpark’s audio nerve center.
“I’m in charge of all park entertainment on a game day and I also DJ at games,” said Levine. “All the graphics and stats you see on the video boards, including the on-field promotional crew, the P.A. announcer, the ballpark organist and the music playlists, fall under my umbrella.”
Throughout the game, Levine looks after a number of inputs: “On a given game day, we’ll have, say, the graphics computer, which is feeding audio along with the video or graphics it’s displaying. Then, there’s the P.A. announcer, both on-field wireless microphones and the stereo inputs from the DJ playlist computer. If we have our organist here for the game, that’s another stereo pair. Lastly, when we have fireworks, we’ve used a CD player for background music. We still have inputs to spare, so we’re planning on adding more sources.”
Levine has been using the mixer’s Wi-Fi remote control feature when he goes out into the stands and around the concourse, as it allows him to adjust the mix on his smartphone: “While I’m walking through the ballpark, I can control everything from my iPhone or tablet. If someone says, ‘Hey, this or that level is too high,’ I can go boom, pull it back, EQ it, mute something that’s being a problem, whatever I need to do….
“We have speakers all around the concourse, and on the fascia up above the suites. The TouchMix is also feeding additional speakers inside the VIP suites and more still in our Legacy Club, which is a separate indoor room. There are also the outfield speakers. Even with the windows in the sound booth open, I can’t necessarily tell if something in a particular area is too loud or too soft, too effect-heavy or too dry, or EQ’ed ideally. So being able to actually go out there, pull out my phone, and make tweaks is absolutely critical, and I can do it without constantly running back to the control room. Working this way wouldn’t be possible without TouchMix.”
Raley Field • www.raleyfield.com
QSC • www.qsc.com
