Why are the Mavericks’ rim microphones so loud? Here’s the fascinating reason you hear every swish
Swishes are different in Dallas. The sweet snap of the nylon nets when a basketball flies perfectly through the cylinder is louder and bigger, a sound that sloshes through the American Airlines Center and across television broadcasts alike. The noisy reverberation doesn’t play favorites, doesn’t discriminate between a Mavericks player or an opponent who has launched the ball.
If you shoot, you’ll hear it. And if you’re watching, you’ll eventually notice it, too.
“The swish and the sound, it’s one of the best feelings ever,” Davis Bertans said. “Compared to other arenas, this is definitely the loudest one. Most of them, if they have mics, it’s not even close.”
Bertans noticed years ago, playing for the San Antonio Spurs, long before he was traded to the Mavericks earlier this season. Every basketball player knows the sounds of the court: swishes, clanks, bangs, rattles, squeaks. These sounds don’t need help echoing through empty gyms, but when the American Airlines Center fills with more than 19,000 fans, and when the decibel levels increase for the postseason atmosphere expected for Monday night’s Game 2, microphones are used to amplify the interaction between the 21-ounce ball and the 18-inch rim.
“You only notice it when you missing,” Dorian Finney-Smith said. “It’s that clank when you missing.”
It’s true: While the swishes might be most pleasant, these microphones capture every sound around the rim. If you’ve ever noticed a television broadcast’s audio briefly cut out during a basketball game, it’s likely those microphones caught something inappropriate that was about to be aired. “My mom says the basketball court is the only place I can cuss,” Finney-Smith said, and he takes full advantage. Bertans has had friends text him, amused, when his Latvian or Russian curses sneak through uncensored.
It’s not just players who have noticed the Dallas arena amplifies these ball-on-rim interactions louder than others. “I have to get this out: The rim microphones are too loud,” ESPN’s Zach Lowe wrote in 2018. He bemoaned hearing grunts and growls from under-the-basket players like Salah Mejri or Zaza Pachulia.
“(I noticed) pretty soon after I started covering the league a decade ago,” Lowe told me. “The loud swish is awesome. The loud clunk can be almost jarring, which I guess is cool because it really makes a brick. It really lands with a thud. And yeah, I’m still scarred by the deep, baritone moaning of Zaza Pachulia around the basket.”
Spencer Dinwiddie also noticed this phenomenon, prior to being traded to Dallas this season, and assumed it was for Dirk Nowitzki. “With the way Dirk shot,” Dinwiddie said, “he had a lot of swishes.” But the reason, it turns out, isn’t that deliberate. The boosted effect was just something team owner Mark Cuban heard about two decades ago at an All-Star event and wanted in his team’s arena, too.
“(I) loved it,” Cuban wrote in an email. “I wanted them because I thought it amplified the energy in the arena.”
Cuban asked if the effect could be replicated, and Dallas has had louder swishes and clanks ever since. But while there are other arenas that have tried recreating this acoustic sensation, teams that have called the Mavericks to ask about it have been surprised at how these sounds are actually created. It’s far more complicated than a microphone attached to the basket.
“It’s hard to replicate,” said Jonathan Kornblith, the team’s vice president of entertainment and in-game experience. “It’s one of those things where it’s Jeff.”
Jeff McGinnis is watching the Mavericks regular-season finale from Section 122, sitting in the open passageway that encircles the top of the arena’s lower bowl. This is his work office when Dallas plays home games; he’s surrounded by four different monitors and a massive soundboard with an endless number of switches, knobs and dials, constantly tweaking them based on what he hears.
McGinnis has been an audio engineer for the Mavericks since 1999 and was hired full-time two years later, although he’s a contractor now. He’s been attuned to sound since he was in high school, something which turned into a career following bands and artists to calibrate the venues they played in. For years, he worked with legendary Motown vocalist Diana Ross. Now, he mixes audio for the stadium where basketball legends play — including each and every shot that soars through the air.
Not once before the first quarter begins. Not occasional fiddling with the levels throughout. No, McGinnis raises the microphone levels with his right hand for every shot taken the entire game, and he immediately slams them back down when the split-second interaction has passed. It’s a manual process, repeated more than 200 times each game, that he’s honed for two decades into muscle memory.
Cuban didn’t believe me when I told him. “I don’t think it’s by hand because they turn them on when I’m shooting before games,” he wrote over email. I might not have believed it, either, if I wasn’t standing behind McGinnis at this game two weeks ago, watching his hands flick a sliding switch up and down as shots near the rim.
This, right here, is why swishes sound different in Dallas.
视频When Cuban asked for this two decades ago, McGinnis was one of the engineers tasked with figuring out how. Rim microphones weren’t new, and most television basketball broadcasts use them to create the swishing, clanking sounds you’re accustomed to hearing each game. It just wasn’t something typically used for the in-arena experience.
McGinnis installed two sets of microphones on each basket, one for the rim’s noise and another for the backboard itself. That’s how the actual sound is captured. But there was a dilemma: Loudly projecting that sound into the arena itself would create feedback if the levels were consistently raised like Cuban wanted, something television engineers don’t deal with when they use the same microphones for their own broadcast. (They’re projecting the sound, essentially, into your living room; they don’t need to worry about the in-arena sound system freaking out.) So McGinnis found a solution.
“The microphone would hear the speaker, the speaker hears the sound, it makes a loop and it would be feedback,” he said. “But because the microphone is 80 feet away from the speaker, I have a little time that I can turn (the rim microphones) on as loud as I want to, and then turn it off before that loop happens.”
McGinnis now performs this action instinctually, his right hand working independent from his left, like a piano player pressing keys at different rhythms. He might be focused on something else entirely while he raises levels for each shot. During the regular-season finale, he spent the first minutes figuring out a faulty handheld microphone used by one of the in-arena hosts. He talked to Kornblith seated to his right, finding ways to communicate over the crowd’s pulsating noise that, ironically, he’s helping manipulate. While I watched, he still didn’t mistime a single shot.
“It’s an art form,” Kornblith said. “It’s his baby, his project, and he takes a lot of pride in all of his work.”
McGinnis sometimes runs the mics for Cuban’s pregame shooting rituals, which explains his disbelief. But during games, he’s constantly supervising audio levels throughout the entire arena. When Luka Doncic is given a microphone moments before the game to thank fans for their support, that microphone’s output runs through McGinnis’ soundboard. So does the microphone for Sean Heath, the team’s public address announcer, whose audio levels are constantly adjusted to reach above the crowd’s.
During the game’s loudest moments, the arena’s decibel levels might peak slightly above 100; during timeouts, it’s around 85. “I react to wherever the crowd is,” McGinnis said. He doesn’t believe turning up the volume creates more excited crowds. Only the basketball can do that; he’s just adjusting noise levels to what’s naturally being omitted from fans.
In that context, McGinnis’ modulation of the rim microphone only comprises one small part of his job. Sure, he occasionally turns them up on the wrong end of the court, or doesn’t react fast enough to an immediate putback attempt. There are a hundred more things he’s tasked with. But he’s come to appreciate the nuances of every manner shots can interact with the rim: the plunk of a layup off the backboard, the smack of a miss off the iron. There’s still nothing better than a swish.
“Any 3-point shot right through the net, not hitting the rim, if I get it at the right exact time,” he said, “it’s the greatest sound ever.”
Last week, McGinnis led me to a closet-sized room on the suite level of the American Airlines Center, and he started singing to me. “All the kids know who Travis Scott is,” he explained. “He uses autotune the wrong way to make his sound.” He’s speaking into a microphone, projecting Doncic’s name like the public address announcer might after a made shot, showing me the autotune effect. There’s a brand-new soundboard in this room waiting to be installed, more modern than what McGinnis currently uses, that would allow announcers to use effects just like these.
“It will be another nuanced flavor that other (arena engineers) will be like, ‘How’re they doing that?’” he said. “Well, first, they’ll ask, ‘Why’re they doing that?’ Well, I don’t know. Because we can? Because it’s neat? Because it’s some new sound we can try?”
Cuban often influences the franchise he owns in ways just like this. He didn’t know how the rim microphones worked, but he asked years ago if it was possible. “We have an owner that doesn’t really stand over us and say, ‘What are you doing? Don’t be doing that,’” McGinnis said. Cuban has always challenged the NBA’s homogeneity, and his instincts spread to those around him.
“Mark is not afraid of, really, anything,” Lowe said, “but especially any type of innovation that would make (basketball games) accessible for fans who might not be super interested in the nuances of it but want to go to a show, to see a show, like they’re seeing a lot of bells and whistles.”
Kornblith views the team’s objective with its in-game presentation as “throwing a party” every game. It’s subjective, of course. “The way I think it sounds good is different from the way you might think it sounds good,” McGinnis said. The Mavericks’ rim microphone phenomenon also has gained its niche popularity from fans who think it’s too loud. (The louder in-arena effect typically gets picked up by television broadcasts even when they aren’t amplifying their own rim microphone levels more than usual.) But no one can question if it’s unique.
“You have an expectation of certain sounds you hear when you go to a game: shoes squeaking, the sound of the net, the bouncing of the ball, guys yelling,” Kornblith said. “If you showed up at a 24 Hour Fitness, that’s the type of stuff you’d hear. I think there’s definitely that authenticity to it. We want to bring things into our show, our arena, that you can’t get at home.”
As I stood behind McGinnis, watching him flick the volume up and down with perfect timing, he remarked, “It’s not magic.” But late in the quarter, when a 3-pointer dropped straight through the rim, and the crackling swish perfectly preceded the crowd’s roaring crescendo, it sure felt like it.
Why are the Mavericks’ rim microphones so loud? Here’s the fascinating reason you hear every swish
Swishes are different in Dallas. The sweet snap of the nylon nets when a basketball flies perfectly through the cylinder is louder and bigger, a sound that sloshes through the American Airlines Center and across television broadcasts alike. The noisy reverberation doesn’t play favorites, doesn’t discriminate between a Mavericks player or an opponent who has launched the ball.
If you shoot, you’ll hear it. And if you’re watching, you’ll eventually notice it, too.
“The swish and the sound, it’s one of the best feelings ever,” Davis Bertans said. “Compared to other arenas, this is definitely the loudest one. Most of them, if they have mics, it’s not even close.”
Bertans noticed years ago, playing for the San Antonio Spurs, long before he was traded to the Mavericks earlier this season. Every basketball player knows the sounds of the court: swishes, clanks, bangs, rattles, squeaks. These sounds don’t need help echoing through empty gyms, but when the American Airlines Center fills with more than 19,000 fans, and when the decibel levels increase for the postseason atmosphere expected for Monday night’s Game 2, microphones are used to amplify the interaction between the 21-ounce ball and the 18-inch rim.
“You only notice it when you missing,” Dorian Finney-Smith said. “It’s that clank when you missing.”
It’s true: While the swishes might be most pleasant, these microphones capture every sound around the rim. If you’ve ever noticed a television broadcast’s audio briefly cut out during a basketball game, it’s likely those microphones caught something inappropriate that was about to be aired. “My mom says the basketball court is the only place I can cuss,” Finney-Smith said, and he takes full advantage. Bertans has had friends text him, amused, when his Latvian or Russian curses sneak through uncensored.
It’s not just players who have noticed the Dallas arena amplifies these ball-on-rim interactions louder than others. “I have to get this out: The rim microphones are too loud,” ESPN’s Zach Lowe wrote in 2018. He bemoaned hearing grunts and growls from under-the-basket players like Salah Mejri or Zaza Pachulia.
“(I noticed) pretty soon after I started covering the league a decade ago,” Lowe told me. “The loud swish is awesome. The loud clunk can be almost jarring, which I guess is cool because it really makes a brick. It really lands with a thud. And yeah, I’m still scarred by the deep, baritone moaning of Zaza Pachulia around the basket.”
Spencer Dinwiddie also noticed this phenomenon, prior to being traded to Dallas this season, and assumed it was for Dirk Nowitzki. “With the way Dirk shot,” Dinwiddie said, “he had a lot of swishes.” But the reason, it turns out, isn’t that deliberate. The boosted effect was just something team owner Mark Cuban heard about two decades ago at an All-Star event and wanted in his team’s arena, too.
“(I) loved it,” Cuban wrote in an email. “I wanted them because I thought it amplified the energy in the arena.”
Cuban asked if the effect could be replicated, and Dallas has had louder swishes and clanks ever since. But while there are other arenas that have tried recreating this acoustic sensation, teams that have called the Mavericks to ask about it have been surprised at how these sounds are actually created. It’s far more complicated than a microphone attached to the basket.
“It’s hard to replicate,” said Jonathan Kornblith, the team’s vice president of entertainment and in-game experience. “It’s one of those things where it’s Jeff.”
Jeff McGinnis is watching the Mavericks regular-season finale from Section 122, sitting in the open passageway that encircles the top of the arena’s lower bowl. This is his work office when Dallas plays home games; he’s surrounded by four different monitors and a massive soundboard with an endless number of switches, knobs and dials, constantly tweaking them based on what he hears.
McGinnis has been an audio engineer for the Mavericks since 1999 and was hired full-time two years later, although he’s a contractor now. He’s been attuned to sound since he was in high school, something which turned into a career following bands and artists to calibrate the venues they played in. For years, he worked with legendary Motown vocalist Diana Ross. Now, he mixes audio for the stadium where basketball legends play — including each and every shot that soars through the air.
Not once before the first quarter begins. Not occasional fiddling with the levels throughout. No, McGinnis raises the microphone levels with his right hand for every shot taken the entire game, and he immediately slams them back down when the split-second interaction has passed. It’s a manual process, repeated more than 200 times each game, that he’s honed for two decades into muscle memory.
Cuban didn’t believe me when I told him. “I don’t think it’s by hand because they turn them on when I’m shooting before games,” he wrote over email. I might not have believed it, either, if I wasn’t standing behind McGinnis at this game two weeks ago, watching his hands flick a sliding switch up and down as shots near the rim.
This, right here, is why swishes sound different in Dallas.
视频When Cuban asked for this two decades ago, McGinnis was one of the engineers tasked with figuring out how. Rim microphones weren’t new, and most television basketball broadcasts use them to create the swishing, clanking sounds you’re accustomed to hearing each game. It just wasn’t something typically used for the in-arena experience.
McGinnis installed two sets of microphones on each basket, one for the rim’s noise and another for the backboard itself. That’s how the actual sound is captured. But there was a dilemma: Loudly projecting that sound into the arena itself would create feedback if the levels were consistently raised like Cuban wanted, something television engineers don’t deal with when they use the same microphones for their own broadcast. (They’re projecting the sound, essentially, into your living room; they don’t need to worry about the in-arena sound system freaking out.) So McGinnis found a solution.
“The microphone would hear the speaker, the speaker hears the sound, it makes a loop and it would be feedback,” he said. “But because the microphone is 80 feet away from the speaker, I have a little time that I can turn (the rim microphones) on as loud as I want to, and then turn it off before that loop happens.”
McGinnis now performs this action instinctually, his right hand working independent from his left, like a piano player pressing keys at different rhythms. He might be focused on something else entirely while he raises levels for each shot. During the regular-season finale, he spent the first minutes figuring out a faulty handheld microphone used by one of the in-arena hosts. He talked to Kornblith seated to his right, finding ways to communicate over the crowd’s pulsating noise that, ironically, he’s helping manipulate. While I watched, he still didn’t mistime a single shot.
“It’s an art form,” Kornblith said. “It’s his baby, his project, and he takes a lot of pride in all of his work.”
McGinnis sometimes runs the mics for Cuban’s pregame shooting rituals, which explains his disbelief. But during games, he’s constantly supervising audio levels throughout the entire arena. When Luka Doncic is given a microphone moments before the game to thank fans for their support, that microphone’s output runs through McGinnis’ soundboard. So does the microphone for Sean Heath, the team’s public address announcer, whose audio levels are constantly adjusted to reach above the crowd’s.
During the game’s loudest moments, the arena’s decibel levels might peak slightly above 100; during timeouts, it’s around 85. “I react to wherever the crowd is,” McGinnis said. He doesn’t believe turning up the volume creates more excited crowds. Only the basketball can do that; he’s just adjusting noise levels to what’s naturally being omitted from fans.
In that context, McGinnis’ modulation of the rim microphone only comprises one small part of his job. Sure, he occasionally turns them up on the wrong end of the court, or doesn’t react fast enough to an immediate putback attempt. There are a hundred more things he’s tasked with. But he’s come to appreciate the nuances of every manner shots can interact with the rim: the plunk of a layup off the backboard, the smack of a miss off the iron. There’s still nothing better than a swish.
“Any 3-point shot right through the net, not hitting the rim, if I get it at the right exact time,” he said, “it’s the greatest sound ever.”
Last week, McGinnis led me to a closet-sized room on the suite level of the American Airlines Center, and he started singing to me. “All the kids know who Travis Scott is,” he explained. “He uses autotune the wrong way to make his sound.” He’s speaking into a microphone, projecting Doncic’s name like the public address announcer might after a made shot, showing me the autotune effect. There’s a brand-new soundboard in this room waiting to be installed, more modern than what McGinnis currently uses, that would allow announcers to use effects just like these.
“It will be another nuanced flavor that other (arena engineers) will be like, ‘How’re they doing that?’” he said. “Well, first, they’ll ask, ‘Why’re they doing that?’ Well, I don’t know. Because we can? Because it’s neat? Because it’s some new sound we can try?”
Cuban often influences the franchise he owns in ways just like this. He didn’t know how the rim microphones worked, but he asked years ago if it was possible. “We have an owner that doesn’t really stand over us and say, ‘What are you doing? Don’t be doing that,’” McGinnis said. Cuban has always challenged the NBA’s homogeneity, and his instincts spread to those around him.
“Mark is not afraid of, really, anything,” Lowe said, “but especially any type of innovation that would make (basketball games) accessible for fans who might not be super interested in the nuances of it but want to go to a show, to see a show, like they’re seeing a lot of bells and whistles.”
Kornblith views the team’s objective with its in-game presentation as “throwing a party” every game. It’s subjective, of course. “The way I think it sounds good is different from the way you might think it sounds good,” McGinnis said. The Mavericks’ rim microphone phenomenon also has gained its niche popularity from fans who think it’s too loud. (The louder in-arena effect typically gets picked up by television broadcasts even when they aren’t amplifying their own rim microphone levels more than usual.) But no one can question if it’s unique.
“You have an expectation of certain sounds you hear when you go to a game: shoes squeaking, the sound of the net, the bouncing of the ball, guys yelling,” Kornblith said. “If you showed up at a 24 Hour Fitness, that’s the type of stuff you’d hear. I think there’s definitely that authenticity to it. We want to bring things into our show, our arena, that you can’t get at home.”
As I stood behind McGinnis, watching him flick the volume up and down with perfect timing, he remarked, “It’s not magic.” But late in the quarter, when a 3-pointer dropped straight through the rim, and the crackling swish perfectly preceded the crowd’s roaring crescendo, it sure felt like it.
