Sony’s newly engineered NFL Coach’s Headsets will soon be appearing on the sidelines with a series of new innovations to ensure proper noise-cancellation, vocal clarity, comfort and durability regardless of the weather.
The custom-made headsets -- developed in less than a year since the NFL and Sony announced their wide-ranging partnership -- borrow some features from their high-end consumer headphones while incorporating a new highly-directional mic to isolate the coach’s voice and new water resistance to ensure operability in all conditions.
The new Sony-branded headsets were tested in the background on NFL sidelines last season and were distributed to team coaching staffs late last month in advance of training camps opening this week.
“Sony engineers visited each of the sidelines -- they heard feedback from the coaches to make sure that what are some of the points that they should be addressing?” said NFL VP/Football Technology Rama Ravindranathan. “So it’s an iterative development process where Sony engineers partnered with NFL IT, football operations, game operations, to ensure every bit of the feedback was gathered and consolidated.”
That included data collection of hottest and coldest NFL games from the past 20 years, as well as recording crowd noise from a Monday Night Football game at SoFi Stadium where the volume exceeded 100 decibels.
Shunsuke Nakahashi, Product Manager for Audio at Sony, said engineers replicated that noise in a special studio in Tokyo, wore the headsets in the shower and in large refrigerators to test its all-conditions functionality. The belt pack connects to the Verizon private network in use in all stadiums. Ravindranathan said that was tested by the yellow hat-wearing communications technicians last season as “coach proxies.”
“We use the insights and principle from XM6,” Nakahashi said, referring to the top Sony consumer product, “and also we have a deep engineering foundation in precision sound and also vocal clarity.”
The Sony lettering on the headsets is large and unmistakable and becomes some of the most visible on-field signage, said NFL SVP/Sponsorship Tracie Rodburg, noting that Sony joins Nike, Gatorade and Microsoft among the most prominent branding. Sponsorship of the NFL headsets had been vacant for two years since Bose exited its deal after eight seasons of holding that inventory.
“Working with Sony, we’re both committed to innovation,” she said, adding: “We want to make sure everybody knows that we have a trusted partner on the sideline.”
While the new Sony headsets are custom-built for the demands of NFL coaches, some of the newly developed features might eventually trickle their way down to the broader market.
“Right now, we’re just razor-focused on delivering the NFL Coach’s Headset, but once everything is settled, then probably we can foresee what element we can bring to the consumer,” Nakahashi said.
