CTS Audio Uses New Yamaha CL Consoles at High Profile Christian EventsWomen of Faith, the nation's largest live event for women has unveiled its most transformational tour yet entitled Celebrate What Matters. The cross-country tour highlights some never-before-seen elements including a live worship band, a new state-of-the art stage, and live ballet. The four-month, 23-city North American tour launched August 3 in Columbus, Ohio with a diverse line up of 27 well-known speakers, authors, musicians, and performers including inspirational speakers Ann Voskamp, Jennie Allen, Pat Smith, and Liz Curtis Higgs. Multi-award winning musical guest CeCe Winans returned for the tour again this year along with Mandisa, Amy Grant, Selah, Sheila Walsh, Patsy Clairmont, Sandi Patty, Brenda Warner, Marilyn Meberg, Andy Andrews, Ken Davis, and Lisa Harper. CTS Audio of Nashville, Tennessee, who has supported Women of Faith for over 12 years, is providing two of the new Yamaha CL5 digital consoles for front of house and monitors and two RIO 3224 boxes for the east coast with a similar set up for the west coast dates. "We selected to use the new Yamaha CL consoles on the Celebrate What Matters tour because of its smaller footprint, its digital networking capabilities with Dante, and input and output capabilities," states Mike Taylor, vice president, CTS Audio. "The console is the best sounding console that Yamaha has put out so far in the digital market. With the internal add ons offered in the desk, plug ins aren't even needed." Prior to setting out on the tour, CTS Audio engineers obtained in-house training by Yamaha commercial audio systems staff. In July, CTS Audio provided Yamaha CL consoles for the Covenant High In Christ Youth Conference (CHIC), a tri-annual event, with performances by Chris Tomlin, Skillet, La Crae, Michael Gungor, Willow Creek Worship Team, and over 6,000 high school students in attendance. For this event, CTS Audio provided four CL5 consoles, two at front of house, two at monitors, and four RIO 3224 boxes. "The set up for this event was unique in that we daisy chained all the equipment together to form one large network for openings and worship acts," says Taylor. "We did this so that inputs/outputs could be called into any surface we wanted for maximum flexibility. With the new platform, we were able to run one network and have 128 inputs and 64 outputs available. This was important since we needed all of them for our house band from Willow Creek as well as the guest bands." Up to eight external Rio (Remote I/O) boxes can be used for a total of 256 channels via the Dante digital network. The 5U rack space Rio3224-D includes 32 remote controlled mic/line inputs, 16 line outputs, and four AES-3 outs. The 3U Rio1608-D includes 16 remote controlled mic/line inputs and eight line outputs. Dante network I/O can easily be set up and patched utilizing familiar paradigms within the console user interface, with no external software required for network operations. The goal of the CHIC Conference is to help high school age students in their walk with Christ, something that matches up perfectly with the core of CTS Audio's beliefs. "Being part of such a moving event is something that is near to my heart," states front-of-house engineer Jon Schwarz. CTS Audio staff was on site for guest engineers who required CL training, if necessary. However, Taylor said the engineers found it easy to step up and get to work because the console is laid out in a simple-to-follow-through process. "We were also able to load engineer files from other Yamaha products seamlessly. Everyone left talking about how fantastic the desk sounded." 
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