Building the Moment the Team Hits the Ice

Client: Dallas Stars

Summary: A four-act opening sound track for the Stars’ 2026 playoff run, mixed for the American Airlines Center’s fourteen-channel rig and engineered to hand off cleanly to the goal horn the moment the team comes through the portal.

The Challenge

The Stars call comes without a brief. After more than a decade of working together, in-arena director Kevin Harp and DAP share a working vocabulary built one game at a time. Kevin sends a concept and locked picture. DAP sends back a sound track that fits the room.

For the 2026 playoffs, the assignment was the one we look forward to every spring. Take eighteen thousand fans from the idle moment after warm-ups, through history and rivalry, through the lighting and laser spectacle of the star-shaped portal dropping from the ceiling, through a hype reel that lands every hit on frame, and into the countdown that ends the second the team emerges onto the ice.

Nothing about that arc is on tape. Kevin fires every element manually, on a cue list he runs against three moving targets: the crowd’s energy in the room, the locker room readiness so the climax lands the second the team steps onto the ice, and the broadcast’s hard outs so the network does not cut away mid-hit.

The American Airlines Center’s fourteen-channel surround rig is unique to game-time configuration, and it punishes pan moves. Seat coverage is not uniform across the bowl, so anything that flies in the surrounds gets lost for half the room. The mix had to choose its weapons: lasers, crowd fill, and ribbon-screen-matched motion in the surrounds, with specific impact, vocal, and storytelling content held in front of the house where coverage holds.

Our Approach

The opening shown here is a four-film sequence. The full playoff package also includes idles and reopens built around it. This case study focuses on the open, which is the playback example below.

The opening’s voice was the season’s first decision. The Stars ran a bake-off between Stan Robak and longtime play-by-play announcer Ralph Strangis. DAP recorded and produced both versions, and Stars management made the call. Stan won the opening stack on the strength of how his voice fills the room. Ralph won the per-game teasers, where two decades of championship-era play-by-play give the storytelling a nostalgia weight nobody else can deliver.

The open is built in four films, triggered consecutively but cued independently. Each one carries a section of the emotional arc.

A. Timeline, History, Rivalry. Slow and epic, scored against broadcast play-by-play and slow-motion emotional beats. Stan only appears here. The surround mix matches what is happening on the 360-degree ribbon screens ringing the arena, with crowd fill behind it for grounding. Vocals in the licensed music get actively augmented so lyrics survive the room’s reverb and the storytelling reads through.

B. The Portal Drop. Hyper-dynamic, lights and lasers, hybrid electro trailer score underneath. The star-shaped portal descends from the ceiling, loaded with flashing lights, while two massive Texas flags travel across the heads of the lower-bowl crowd. Sensory overload, intentionally.

C. Hype Reel. Aggressive pop-rock, syncopated. Picture is already cut to music when it arrives, so the job is making every hit punchy and audible. The play-by-play calls are chosen specifically to each clip, not interchangeable. When fans on screen do the Stars goal-chant arm movement, the mix drops in a crowd recording of fans doing that exact chant from the library.

D. Countdown and Launch. Builds and holds. The piece does not try to be the climax. It holds at the peak until PA announcer Jeff K is cued to call the team onto the ice. The moment Jeff K’s call lands and the team emerges through the portal, the D sound track ducks out and the goal song plus goal horn take over. The pre-produced stack hands off to the most iconic sound the franchise owns.

What anchors all four films is a sound archive that lives at DAP. Over more than twenty-five years of attending every playoff game and many regular-season games with a personal recording rig, Rene has built a proprietary library of Stars crowd recordings. Isolated goal horn, clean, with no crowd. Pure crowd goal reactions with no horn. The horn and the crowd together. The Stars goal chant. Big-hit reactions. Big-save reactions. Tagged both specifically (Mike Modano’s last home game, when his face stayed on the screen for a five-minute ovation that never cut away; the Blackwell hit this season) and generically (giant crowd hit reaction), so a moment can be retrieved by who, or by emotional shape. The Stars make it possible by granting access and a media pass.

On certain moments the picture has to lock to the sound, not the other way around. An example from this season’s broader package was a song that had to sync to the mascot’s drum hit and the crowd’s “Let’s Go Stars” chant inside an Ice Girls video edited by Georgi McCauley. Kevin’s team sent the song ahead of picture lock. DAP built the synced music edit and a separate sound-effects stem, then handed both back to Georgi, who cut picture to the sound. The locked edit came back with stems for further design.

In the room itself, the mix moves only where the room lets it. Surrounds carry diffuse content. Pan moves stay in front. Vocals in the licensed music get augmented for intelligibility. Balances get tuned in the control room with the arena’s frequency response in mind, so the mix that sounds right at the desk also sounds right under the rafters.

Results

The first video landed at DAP about four weeks before puck drop. Production was smooth, no fires.

The pride point this season was translation. The mix balances built in the control room came up cleanly on the house system, no surprises. After more than twenty-five years of room listening it still gets earned, not assumed.

The work does not ride on a Cup narrative this season. It rides on what happened in the room when the team came through the portal. Not bad for a guy in a little dark room making noises.