DAYTONA, FLORIDA:
The days of kicking back with a bag of corn chips and a cold one to watch your favorite NASCAR driver zipping around the raceway as a tiny blip on your TV screen are fast fading. Technological innovations and the forward-thinking people of NASCAR are placing each fan inside their favorite driver’s car to feel the intensity and raw emotions that are inextricably linked with driving at 200 mph. A key component of that technology is the delivery of in-car audio for every Nextel Cup Series(tm) race, provided to fans via their cell phones or through a pay-per-use feature on NASCAR’s website and provided to interested media outlets through dedicated feeds. Fans have jumped at the chance to listen to their favorite driver communicate race strategy, car and track conditions, and pit stop logistics with his spotter and pit crew.
Of course, NASCAR drivers qualify for races by driving quickly. There is no requirement that they refrain from swearing, and when things get tense, believe it or not, they sometimes utter profanities that would make the ears of an eight year-old race fan burn. Thus, NASCAR is obliged to police the in-car audio, and they do so with twenty-four highly reliable, simple to operate Symetrix AirTools 6100 Broadcast Audio Delays.
Daniel Braverman, president of Radio Systems, Inc., and his team integrated the system for NASCAR Images, the division of NASCAR that has the weighty responsibility of dispensing the sound and visuals for every race. Radio Systems is a manufacturer of professional radio broadcast equipment and the exclusive manufacturer of the StudioHub+ wiring and integration system. This is the system that allowed them to set up the elaborate in-car audio infrastructure in the span of a weekend in January 2007.
From every track in the Nextel Cup Series NASCAR Images can uplink 48 channels of in-car audio to their site in Charlotte, North Carolina, where all 48 channels are delayed through the twenty-four AirTools 6100s in AES/EBU dual mono pairs. The AirTools 6100 conveys every nuance, every bated breath, and every shout with a deep 24-bit, HD-compatible word length and 48kHz sampling rate (synchable between 30 and 50kHz).
If the muscle of the in-car audio policing system is the rack of AirTools delays, then its brain is surely the sophisticated digital routing system manufactured by Seara Automated Systems of Burbank, California. This digital router allows all of those channels to be connected in any conceivable matrix of inputs and outputs. And a custom spin of the SAS software written by their programmers specifically for this application does the critical job of pinning the right dump button to the right delay channel. Of course, the ten dogged human monitors still must listen, lap after lap, for words that would make the faint of heart wither and the FCC shudder.
“The genius of the system is its flexibility and the ease with which we’re able to integrate the delays so that the monitors don’t have to think twice when it’s time to dump audio,” commented Braverman. “For those drivers that are more popular, NASCAR will assign a one-to-one monitor. The less popular drivers will be lumped together. You might have one monitor listening to as many as a dozen drivers.”
No matter how many drivers are being listened to, the monitor has just one dump button. A profanity on any single channel will prompt a dump on every channel that he or she is listening to. “NASCAR was very concerned about dumping the obscenity, so they are willing to loose a bit of audio on the other feeds,” Braverman explained.
From the monitoring facility in Charlotte, the sanitized audio is separated by individual drivers and sent to the wider world. It’s NASCAR racing from the driver’s perspective, almost (but not quite) as raw as it gets.
