Turner Audio Engineer Scott Donaldson Dead at 47

Emmy Award-winning Turner Sports audio engineer Scott Donaldson, 47, died Oct. 19 after a long battle with ocular melanoma that had metastasized to his liver. Donaldson, who won a pair of Emmys for his work on Inside the NBA, is survived by his wife, Kimberly, and 15-year-old son, AJ.

Scott Donaldson

After earning a BS in communications from Ithaca College, the Boston-born Donaldson joined ESPN in 1991. At ESPN, he worked on live studio shows in various technical positions — tape playback, audio, graphics, camera — and also served as a video editor for highlights and feature stories.

After nine years, Donaldson moved to Turner Broadcasting System. As senior audio engineer, he was a staple of the Inside the NBA production team and also mixed audio for a variety of other studio shows and remote productions: highlight shows, football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and entertainment shows for TNT, TBS, TCM, NBATV, Turner Sports’ digital properties, and others.

He was formerly a volunteer firefighter in Southington and Cheshire, CT, and a part-time firefighter In Roswell, GA. In his spare time, he worked as a bartender at TopGolf in Roswell.

In addition to his wife and son, Donaldson is survived by a sister, Laurie Donaldson Pani, of San Diego; his mother, Ruth Ann Donaldson, and his father, Doug Donaldson, both of Needham, MA; nieces Sofia Pani and Natalie and Samantha Barnes and nephew Lucas Pani.

Visitation will be on Nov. 4 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Southcare Cremation and Funeral Society in Alpharetta, GA. Funeral services will be Nov. 5 at 11 a.m. at The Episcopal Church of St. Peter & St. Paul in Marietta, GA, followed by a Celebration of Life at TopGolf from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Ocular Melanoma Foundation in Donaldson’s name or to www.GoFundMe.com/thedonaldsons.