If you watched the first two hours of HBO's new miniseries Show Me a Hero last night through a decent sound system, you heard some seriously noisy city council meetings. Created by The Wire's David Simon and directed by two-time Oscar-winner Paul Haggis, the six-hour show details the pitched struggle over federally mandated low-income and affordable housing development in Yonkers, NY, in the late 1980s.

As the production recreated the hostile city council meetings full of protesters who didn't want the new housing units in their neighborhoods, it fell on production sound mixer Franklin D. Stettner, CAS, to capture the production audio. Stettner used two Sound Devices 970 64-track audio recorders running redundantly. In statements provided by Sound Devices, he described his process to capture all the noise generated during the three-camera shoot.

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The scenes required that he record multiple isolated tracks. Cast members playing city council members, the mayor, and the city clerk sat behind individual mics. Hecklers in the crowd were hurling their own lines at the actors up front. His second mixer, Larry Provost, was tasked with recording the city council's audio, while Stettner made sure the hecklers got their say.

"With the 970, I had access to 64 tracks, all of which were Dante-enabled, so I could route all the fixed mics via a LAN to the individual iso tracks," Stettner explained. "I also sent them to a second mixing board with a second mixer, where they were combined to a mono mix, which I incorporated into my mono dailies mix." A technician from Gotham Sound was on hand to make sure the two boards worked together correctly.

Other gear put to use included a Yamaha QL5 series digital console and a Rio1608-D I/O box connected to 12 Shure SM57 mics. Audio was routed to the LAN over Cat5 ethernet cable, and the mics were routed to the Dante iso inputs on the 970 and the Yamaha console's channel inputs.

"By having access to all the stem elements, we were able to give editorial many ways to make sense of material recorded in a very hectic audio environment," Stettner said.