Processing the PBR Tour

St. Louis, MO (May 5, 2025)—When you have thousands of rowdy rodeo fans in the stands—and some equally torqued-up wild animals in the ring—you don’t want the audio to fail. That’s a top concern for the audio team at Gateway Studios & Production Services (St. Louis, MO), ensuring uninterrupted sound across both live and broadcast mixes for Professional Bull Riders (PBR) events

PBR, founded in 1992, hosts more than 200 events annually across North America and abroad, features athletes from five continents, and reaches nearly 300 million households via broadcast and digital platforms. Shane Thomas is the system engineer responsible for deploying and managing GSPS’s touring rig for the flagship PBR Unleash The Beast tour and PBR Teams league, and since 2022, he’s been using Outline’s Newton as the processing core on PBR events.

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In these arena-scale, TV-first environments, he says, “Most of the upstream gear, including our DiGiCo Q338 console, runs at 48 kHz for broadcast, while our PA is at 96 kHz. Newton’s SRC is rock solid. We’ve never had a single clocking issue. That gives us a lot of confidence. I use one layer of EQ to shape the room, and FOH engineers—whether they’re traveling with the show or hired locally—can make their own tweaks on top of that. We’ve built a workflow that allows consistency without locking anyone out.”

“Newton’s been a great tool for our setup—super intuitive and easy to program right out of the box,” says Thomas. “The user interface is straightforward, which makes day-to-day use fast and hassle-free.”