Jason Blood on the Game-Changing Impact of Voyage Audio’s Spatial Mic

August 12, 2025

Below, Jason shares how Voyage Audio’s Dante Spatial Mic has become an essential part of his audio capture toolkit for Big Noon Kickoff.
 
On Big Noon Kickoff, microphones aren’t just used for crowd ambience—the show features a lot of marching bands, and they’re a major part of the broadcast. I need to capture the energy of those performances cleanly and musically, especially for tracking in and out of commercial breaks. That’s always been a tricky setup, and getting mics in the right positions to do it well has been a consistent challenge.
 
I’ve been working with Dale Pro Audio and Joe Prout (Dale’s Senior Director of Broadcast Sales) since the early 2000s, when I was a staff audio engineer at ESPN. I had heard about the Spatial Mic, but it was Joe who helped me take the next step. We connected right after a meeting he had with the Voyage folks, where they showed him the Spatial Mic for the first time. He shared that he immediately thought it might be a good fit for my use case. Joe then arranged to send an evaluation unit out so I could experiment with it in a real-world situation.
 
The portability and flexibility of the Voyage mic finally gave me the perfect solution. Unlike a traditional stadium environment, we’re usually set up in open, unpredictable spaces—parking lots, fields, or any high-traffic area just outside the stadium. For example, at BYU, our footprint was large and constantly evolving with last-minute production decisions. One minute, the band is in one spot; the next minute, they’ve shifted because more players showed up.

With a conventional analog setup, that would be nearly impossible to adapt to, especially in our tight production windows. However, with the Voyage Spatial Mic, our A2s simply run two Cat5 cables—one this way, one that way—and wait. Once production gives the green light, we plug in the mic, and we’re ready to go. It’s that simple. And, beyond the convenience, it sounds amazing. I rarely touch the EQ—maybe just a bit if absolutely necessary. The capsules are so high quality, I get a full, rich marching band sound from a single mic at the end of a network cable.
 
Since adding the Voyage Audio Dante Spatial Mics to Big Noon Kickoff, I’ve never been happier. Being able to finally achieve the audio vision we’ve had in mind is incredibly satisfying.

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