Broadcast mixes have flattened the sound of a full stadium

The noise you hear at home has been compressed into a steady hum that removes the one thing crowds actually do.

Sit in a ground for a late equaliser and the sound does something a television will not give you. It arrives in stages. A gasp, half a second of nothing, then the roar, and the roar has a shape, rising and breaking and settling into a lower rumble that lasts a minute and a half.

Now watch the same goal on a broadcast. It is loud immediately, it stays loud, and it stops. The peaks have been squashed down and the quiet parts pulled up, because that is what audio compression does, and every broadcaster runs heavy compression so that the commentary never gets buried and so that nobody watching on a phone speaker loses the words.

I understand why. I still think it costs us more than we admit. The dynamic range of a crowd is information. The gap between the hush when a set piece is being lined up and the noise when it comes in is the reason a stadium feels dangerous. Flatten that gap and you get a wall of texture that could belong to any game, any ground, any minute. It becomes wallpaper.

There is a second problem, which is where the microphones sit. Pitchside mics are aimed at the pitch, so they favour the strike of the ball, the shouts, the referee's whistle. The stand mics are usually mixed low because they pick up things broadcasters do not want to transmit. What survives is a version of the crowd that has been edited for content as well as for level.

You notice all of this immediately in an empty stadium, which we all sat through and would rather not repeat. The interesting part of that period was not that it sounded worse. It was that it sounded more honest, and a lot of us discovered we could hear tactical instructions being shouted from a technical area for the first time in our lives.

The compromise I would like is not complicated. Give me a second audio option with the crowd mixed high and the commentary off, the way some broadcasters already offer a stadium feed. A handful do it. Most do not bother, because take-up is low.

Take-up is low partly because nobody knows it exists. That is a marketing failure, not a proof that people prefer the hum.