Sports venue scoreboard operators are always looking for new ways to capture the attention of fans with sound effects. "There's no absolute trend in the sounds played at games," says Fran Kowalski, Sound & Video Productions co-owner. "Some teams, like the Philadelphia 76ers and the Dallas Mavericks, love to push the envelope in terms of sounds and effects. Other teams can be conservative, playing the same clips year after year, because the fans know them and respond to them."

Kowalski's company now offers Pro Audio 6, an updated version of Sound & Video Productions' SFX and audio presentation system, is now available with more than 5,000 on-screen buttons, a nonlinear wave editor, the ability to batch-capture MP3/WAV files, as well as a sound-over-sound and crossfade capability, and broadcast-quality playback.

What do leagues want in terms of audio clips for home games? "More of the same but different," says Sound & Video Productions co-owner Fran Kowalski, without a trace of irony. An example of how to solve that conundrum is found in the company’s latest sound library, where Kowalski had a salsa music arrangement of familiar "cheers," the sound clips used to get fans up on their feet, drawn up and performed by top Latino musicians. He did the same with a roster of top Nashville studio players, including the legendary Buddy Emmons on pedal steel guitar, for countryfied versions of time-tested cheers.

Sound & Video Productions’ audio clip libraries aren’t customized for specific teams or leagues, though they do contain several versions of each clip so that venues can tailor them to particular crowds. But occasionally there is a bespoke production. Kowalski wrote and produced for the Nashville Predators a track called "The Fat Lady Sings," a booming operatic production whose chant ends with, "It's all over now!"

"That one really caught on with the Preds’ fans," he says.

Some of the latest clips are new cheers with beefy arena-rock themes. When introducing a new cheer, Kowalski says he’s learned one lesson: always put a clap track on the clip. "The claps are the audience participation cues," he explains. "It’s a signal to the fans that this is their part. You have to do it with a new and unfamiliar cheer."

What doesn't work as well? The massively orchestrated military-like take-the-field intros favored on television don’t play as well in person, says Kowlaski. "They seem to be a little over-the-top live," he says.

But most important, he says, is the person driving the system. "There are a wide range of people in charge of audio clips for a game," he says. "The better someone is at sensing the mood of the crowd and picking the right clips at the right time, the better the results are going to be for the team and the venue."