The Patriots would have to be really dumb to try some of their old tricks right out of the gate. They have to know that everyone will jump on every single perceived 'issue' now.
Or maybe they really do believe that people outside their little bubble believe they've been proven squeaky-clean.
BTW I didn't watch last night's game, nor indeed any Patriots game (superbowl excepted) because they're so full of shit and get away with so much… from Tom Brady's kung-fu kick slide to 'random' events like this.
Mark Cuban is right. When this kind of thing reaches critical mass, WWE style, the vaguely-interested people will start turning off in their droves. Goodbye golden goose.
A few things to unpack here: first, the problem is not in the headsets. Headsets are nothing more than a microphone on a boom and a couple of headphone speakers tied to together with a headband. All the heavy lifting is done in the beltpack. Beltpacks are the transceivers that communicate to the base station- they are what cuts out or get static or spurious audio. Traditional Radiocom is UHF analog, transmitting in the 500 Mhz range and receiving in roughly the 600 Mhz range. The NFL uses Telex, in the past it was BTR 700s and BTR 800s. Supposedly, the entire league has switched over to the BTR-1, which is a digital system that still operates in the 500-700 Mhz range, but encrypts audio to digital. Pay no attention to the advertising on the side of the headset- Motorola didn't provide jack to the NFL in past seasons, they just paid to have their logo slapped on the gear. Likewise, Bose may have provided a noise canceling mic or earpiece, but they are still Telex built systems with Telex built headsets.
While wireless systems can be real finicky to setup and troubleshoot, getting extraneous audio into them is not a normal problem. The systems on the sideline interface with a hard wired system in the booth. It's possible that a poorly shielded system could get ingress from radio sources, or that the system was improperly terminated. But the usual problems are dropouts and static, not audio and usually grounding issues cause 60 Hz hum, not audio artifacts. They are also usually constant problems, rather than intermittent. It's possible that there's an RF dead spot on the field- radio waves are easy to block and a stadium has more than enough concrete and steel to be a problem.
I'm inclined to believe though that the Pats were probably cheating again (still). Bill Belichick is likely lying about them having problems on their side- the idea that the Patriot organization would put up with that in their own stadium is laughable. he also intentionally conflates the coach to coach radiocom system which was the issue last night with the IFB system they use to talk to players on the field- two separate types of technology. Besides the fact that it's suspicious as hell that the problem would come and go as officials approach the Pat's bench, digital com isn't prone to spurious audio problems like analog is, because it's all ones and zeroes before it's broadcast and each transmission has ID flags.
It is true that NFL games are RF soup- you can easily have a couple hundred RF sources, and that's just the official stuff, not counting any crap that fans bring in. You can thank the FCC for making things worse, those assholes are selling off bandwidth as fast as they can to Google and the Telecoms. After they gave away the 700 Mhz band to emergency users and carved out huge holes for digital TV, pro audio users were supposed to use the whitespaces in and around the TV channels. This made millions of dollars of wireless gear illegal to use, and now they're about to sell the 600 Mhz band for internet toys, so all the people who migrated there will now have to spend those millions again. This causes a crowded field for everyone to try to find clean frequencies, which makes it tougher to avoid problems. And it's true that a bad cable or improper setup could cause audio leakage, especially if water exacerbates the problem and shorts out shielding to conduit or gets into non watertight connectors. But given that it's New England that we're talking about, they long ago forfeited the right to the benefit of the doubt.
tl;dr Fuck the Patriots, they were probably cheating…
Gasp! It's almost like the Cheatriots tried to do something untoward!
INCIDENT!
Naaah. If they wanted to do that they woulda been piping-in Bobby Jindal campaign speeches into the Steelers' headsets.
The Patriots would have to be really dumb to try some of their old tricks right out of the gate. They have to know that everyone will jump on every single perceived 'issue' now.
Or maybe they really do believe that people outside their little bubble believe they've been proven squeaky-clean.
BTW I didn't watch last night's game, nor indeed any Patriots game (superbowl excepted) because they're so full of shit and get away with so much… from Tom Brady's kung-fu kick slide to 'random' events like this.
Mark Cuban is right. When this kind of thing reaches critical mass, WWE style, the vaguely-interested people will start turning off in their droves. Goodbye golden goose.
A few things to unpack here: first, the problem is not in the headsets. Headsets are nothing more than a microphone on a boom and a couple of headphone speakers tied to together with a headband. All the heavy lifting is done in the beltpack. Beltpacks are the transceivers that communicate to the base station- they are what cuts out or get static or spurious audio. Traditional Radiocom is UHF analog, transmitting in the 500 Mhz range and receiving in roughly the 600 Mhz range. The NFL uses Telex, in the past it was BTR 700s and BTR 800s. Supposedly, the entire league has switched over to the BTR-1, which is a digital system that still operates in the 500-700 Mhz range, but encrypts audio to digital. Pay no attention to the advertising on the side of the headset- Motorola didn't provide jack to the NFL in past seasons, they just paid to have their logo slapped on the gear. Likewise, Bose may have provided a noise canceling mic or earpiece, but they are still Telex built systems with Telex built headsets.
While wireless systems can be real finicky to setup and troubleshoot, getting extraneous audio into them is not a normal problem. The systems on the sideline interface with a hard wired system in the booth. It's possible that a poorly shielded system could get ingress from radio sources, or that the system was improperly terminated. But the usual problems are dropouts and static, not audio and usually grounding issues cause 60 Hz hum, not audio artifacts. They are also usually constant problems, rather than intermittent. It's possible that there's an RF dead spot on the field- radio waves are easy to block and a stadium has more than enough concrete and steel to be a problem.
I'm inclined to believe though that the Pats were probably cheating again (still). Bill Belichick is likely lying about them having problems on their side- the idea that the Patriot organization would put up with that in their own stadium is laughable. he also intentionally conflates the coach to coach radiocom system which was the issue last night with the IFB system they use to talk to players on the field- two separate types of technology. Besides the fact that it's suspicious as hell that the problem would come and go as officials approach the Pat's bench, digital com isn't prone to spurious audio problems like analog is, because it's all ones and zeroes before it's broadcast and each transmission has ID flags.
It is true that NFL games are RF soup- you can easily have a couple hundred RF sources, and that's just the official stuff, not counting any crap that fans bring in. You can thank the FCC for making things worse, those assholes are selling off bandwidth as fast as they can to Google and the Telecoms. After they gave away the 700 Mhz band to emergency users and carved out huge holes for digital TV, pro audio users were supposed to use the whitespaces in and around the TV channels. This made millions of dollars of wireless gear illegal to use, and now they're about to sell the 600 Mhz band for internet toys, so all the people who migrated there will now have to spend those millions again. This causes a crowded field for everyone to try to find clean frequencies, which makes it tougher to avoid problems. And it's true that a bad cable or improper setup could cause audio leakage, especially if water exacerbates the problem and shorts out shielding to conduit or gets into non watertight connectors. But given that it's New England that we're talking about, they long ago forfeited the right to the benefit of the doubt.
tl;dr Fuck the Patriots, they were probably cheating…
I'd be infuriated if my Steelers weren't dead to me this season.
/steelernationbetrayed
/vickmustgo
/FFS