Did anyone else think the music was too loud? The sound level of the music on Archimedes gave me a pounding headache, and most of the people I talked to about this subject agreed that it was far too loud. Couple the high volume with low frequency music along with being in the stands for 12 hours a day and it’s basically like being tortured.
I wore ear plugs. It helped a lot, and still allowed me to hear the announcer very clearly.
It definitely seemed to be too loud. We used sound meters about 4 years ago and measured regional events and the championship and provided data. Levels were pretty good for a while after that but it seems to be back to the old ways now. When we were packing for St. Louis we left the meters in our lab. We wish we had taken them to collect the data.
ps: a regional we went to this year seemed to be too loud. The emcee was using the filed sound meter to see how loud a response she could get out of the crowd. They should have been using it to measure the too loud levels.
Especially the buzzer. Got used to it after a while, but it’s normally supposed to be loud, so at Archimedes it was really bad.
There was a different sound mixer at each field, so I don’t know about Archimedes… but at Curie it started out way too quiet! (and I wasn’t the only one to think so…) After I let our sound guy know, though, I think it ended up at a good volume.
Newton was just perfect. It was weird; I found a place to watch both Archimedes and Newton at the same time, and Newton was considerably louder than Archimedes, even when in the exact middle.
While we’re at it, the music on Einstein was excellent; much better than last year.
I was told by my driveteam that on the Newton red alliance, the Archimedes announcer/music drowned out everything. They couldn’t hear our entire alliance cheering from the stands nearby, which is somewhat sad.
Archimedes buzzer was really bad indeed.
Curie seemed okay, but the FTC field seemed a bit too loud.
Completely agree.
If teams wanted to cheer, they would have to wait until a match started just to get over the music… even if it wasn’t their match.
The music was so loud at times, I could literally hear/feel my eardrums popping. Communicating was almost impossible with people 2 seats away and yelling as loud as we could. In the future it would be nice if the music was not as dangerously loud.
I experienced this both on Archimedes and Einstein.
Don’t forget one of the championship slogans this year: FIRST is MAKING IT LOUD in St. Louis 