During the first two games of the football season, the new scoreboards inside Sanford Stadium – installed over the summer – have been very noticeable.

Also noticed by fans was a new graphic display that shows how loud the crowd in the stadium is at any given moment.

But throughout Sanford the new display, based on the Mitchell Crowd Meter system, has confused and intrigued many fans.

“I didn’t think that it was real,” said sophomore Marcus Cuffie from Lithonia. “It seemed to keep moving after the crowd had quieted down.”

“I thought that it was someone in the control room making the meter move,” said Robert Watts, a sophomore from Augusta.

The system measures the true level of noise in the stadium by using two microphones located in the hedges at the 50-yard line on each side of the stadium, said Tatum Goodman, a spokeswoman at Mitchell Company, the group that created the system.

The noise is then filtered, taking out excess noise such as air horns, and a decibel reading is calculated and displayed on the scoreboard.

This reading is what the fans in the stadium see.

“When the bar on the graphic moves, the crowd is actually making it move,” Goodman said.

The goal of the system is to create excitement in the crowd and to see how loud the stadium can get.

At the Boise State game, the highest reading was 110, which can be compared to a jet engine which has a decibel reading of 130.

Last weekend at the South Carolina game, the meter had technical difficulty and did not display

any reading over 100 said Goodman and associate athletic director Alan Thomas.

However, the crowd did reach a reading of 108, Goodman said.

Although the system did not work properly, it was still used seven times throughout the game and influenced fans to increase the noise level, Goodman said.

“I definitely got louder because we wanted to see it move, but they also put it on at key moments in the game,” said Fred Tian, a sophomore from Augusta.

The scoreboard will be fully functioning this weekend and all problems have been fixed, Thomas said.

Right now, Sanford is one of three venues in the world to have the system and the only outdoor and college venue that has one.

The other two are in NBA arenas in Texas – the Dallas Mavericks’ American Airlines Arena and the Houston Rockets’ Toyota Center.

The loudest reading to date came in Dallas where the meter reached 116. At the Auburn-LSU game last year, a similar decibel reading created a 4.0 reading on the Richter earthquake measuring scale, Goodman said.