A big part of The Price Is Right is the sound, whether that is microphones, sound effects for the games, or having the audience cheer really loudly. The game show‘s broadcast mixer showed off how he makes it work and shared the secrets of the set.
Henry Muehlhausen gave a tour of the studio on Instagram. He showed himself in the sound booth, moving buttons, and controlling the sound.
Muehlhasusen then walked onto the stage and walked behind the bidder’s row. The broadcast mixer shared that the four contestants who come down are not miked up at that point, but they have the microphones they can speak into on the podiums.
Those microphones are on a remote control-lift, so they can raise up and down, according to a contestant’s height. There is also a set of speakers next to each microphone, allowing them to hear host Drew Carey, announcer George Gray, and the other three contestants’ bids.
Despite it being hard to hear at the podiums, the show encourages a lot of loud noise from the audience. When the winner of bidder’s row gets on stage, they usually get a lav mic, if there is enough time, with a large prize introduction. The other three people are then miced when the winner is playing their game.
“We like to have them miked so when they run over to their prizes and say silly things, we can hear them,” Muehlhausen said. The show also puts lav mics at the end of the bidder’s row podium and some throughout the audience seating, so they can hear the clapping.
There are also eight 416 microphones on the ceiling of the studio “just to capture the whole spread.” Drew Carey’s hand-held microphone is a DPA mic with a cardioid capsule attached to a digital transmitter.
The mixer shared that the mics came with long stems and had goose necks on them, which only worked for podiums, so he took them apart, cut them down, got tubing, painted them, and put them back together. “It’s been holding up pretty well for a couple of years now,” Muehlhausen said.
Bob Barker‘s mic was a Sony ECM-55, and it was a telescope mic, so it would be of different lengths in different eras. It was a hard-wired mic that Barker and a crew member had to pull along the stage.
George Gray has a Super 55 microphone and wears an in-ear, which has the program mix and booth comms, so he can hear the director, AD, and Muehlhausen. The director and AD queue him while the mixer joked, he tries to make Gray laugh.
The audio crew features him, a front of house mixer, an A2, who is a person on the floor who helps Carey, contestants, and adjusts on-set microphones. There is a PL comms person who deals with the battery packs and headsets, an audio engineer who is the support guy, a music playback operator, and a music supervisor.
The Price Is Right, weekdays, 11a/10c, CBS, stream next day on Paramount+