The other day I was sitting in an airport waiting to catch a flight to a John Eldredge conference we were providing services for.  My crew was driving the truck and I was scheduled to meet them onsite so that we could start an early load-in the following day.  As I sat there I watched my flight get delayed to the point where I was not going to be able to fly into my destination city that night.

Side Note: When sitting in an airport, do not sit under the TV.  I was starting to get ticked off at everyone that seemingly was staring at me.  Turns out I was sitting under the Olympic opening ceremonies and the world does not revolve around me.  (Don’t tell my wife that though).

So to continue, it became clear that the earliest I would be able to get into the city was around 11am the following morning and would miss what was to be the trickiest part of the day.  I then made what would in the past be a difficult decision, I canceled my trip.

Having a crew that is completely capable of handling all that goes into making an event run smoothly is not an easy place to get to as a company.  We spend a lot of time as a company making sure that we know the products that we deploy inside and out.  That frees us up when we arrive onsite to be able to give our complete attention to the client.  I know it seems like such a simple thing, but when our equipment works and we are able to give our clients our undivided attention then we are able to better adopt their mission as our own.

Securing that set of engineers that fully deliver everything that our clients come to expect gives them the freedom to make decisions onsite without being micro-managed.  It makes it easier to do my job knowing that they are doing theirs, and then some……

We are in the business of sound, so why is that not the first point of order when evaluating a product?  There are many different products out there that have numerous features but that when is the last time you heard a good conversation about how something sounds besides a microphone or speaker?  New features do help to make your job easier, or could be seen as a preference to how you achieve your goal, although if something does not sound good out of the gate you are fighting and uphill battle the whole time.  Sound quality should take the center stage on how you see a product. 

Over the next few weeks here at CTS Audio we will be testing those exact questions regarding audio equipment.  We will be evaluating products from Shure, Sennheiser, Lucid, Big Ben, Yamaha and Digi Design.  We will evaluate similar products per price range to find out those answers.  Stop on by if you are interested in finding answers to the real question.  After all isn’t that what truly matters?

Engineers, we all have had that moment where we get so frustrated on the road or in our church that we blow up at the wrong person.  All of the emotion of being “in the moment”, seems to come out at all the wrong times.  Working in close proximity to other individuals sometimes can actually push you away from getting to know them.  The closeness can drive us apart, funny how that works, huh?

We all got involved in this industry for all sorts of different reasons, but in the end it all comes down to one.  We are here to serve.  I think that in our haste to make situations work as smooth and seamless as we have grown accustomed to, the pressure gets to us.  We want to control our environment and therefore shut down other people’s ideas that could honestly help us.  Most of the time, as technical people, we lose touch with our creative side or we shut down a creative person when they bring a new idea to the table.

I think this really begs the question, have you been a servant to the message that you help amplify?  Or more importantly, who do you serve?

A Brief History

As all electronic musicians know by now, digital audio has transformed nearly all aspects of modern music production. But one area remains largely analog: signal distribution within recording studios and live-performance venues. Audio distribution systems are prone to all the analog bugaboos, such as signal degradation over long cable runs, electromagnetic interference (EMI), and ground loops.

Several companies have developed various solutions to this problem based on the concept of digital audio networking. However, these systems suffer from several limitations of their own. For example, setting up the network is often quite complicated. In addition, most of these systems can support only one sample rate and bit depth, and clock errors lead to lose timing between networked devices.

An Australian company called Audinate has thrown its hat into the ring. In 2006, the company was spun off from the National Information and Communication Technology Australia (NICTA) research institute to commercialize a digital audio networking system called Dante.

The Audinate system uses standard IP (Internet Protocol) messaging on 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps switched Ethernet networks and offers much more flexibility and ease of use than earlier systems. Audio and control data can easily coexist on the same network, along with traffic such as email, Web browsing, and other office data, allowing it to be implemented using an existing network infrastructure. In addition, PC and Mac applications can be connected to the audio network using the computer’s built-in Ethernet port.

Multiple sample rates and bit depths can share the same network, and all clocks on the system are synchronized to a master clock independently of the audio data, allowing sample-accurate playback from different devices on the network. Latency can be as low as 82 µs, and it can be fixed or variable for different devices and pathways. For example, an audio channel might travel over a gigabit switch to a monitor speaker with sub-millisecond latency while also being sent from the stage over a 100 Mbps venue-distribution network with a latency of 4 ms.

With no other traffic on a 100 Mbps network, Dante can carry up to 32 channels of 96 kHz/24-bit audio or 96 channels of 44.1 kHz/16-bit audio with a latency of 1 ms; a gigabit link can carry at least ten times as many channels. A switched Ethernet environment with a gigabit backbone can accommodate even more channels, especially when the data is unicast from one device to many. To be fair, real-world networks require at least 30 percent of the available bandwidth to allow some headroom and support a reasonable amount of control traffic, reducing the number of channels that can be practically conveyed.

If you have been at CTS Audio lately, you surely have noticed the renovation of a certain room there.  In the past we have held numerous classes for educating ourselves and our clients but have never really had a complete space in which to do so.  When complete the facility will capable of handling a 35 student class with cutting edge technology in an intimate classroom setting.  Well in the next month or so, we will be releasing a full 12 month CTS University class schedule open to the public as well as private classes.

Over the last few years we have held classes on all sorts of current topics ranging from rigging to engineering.  Earlier this year we held a wireless class that helped to answer many 700mhz frequency questions while bringing Shure and Sennheiser in to help speak about the upcoming difficulties in wireless.  It is extremely important to us as an organization to help educate our industry, whether you are employee of CTS Audio or not.  Helping to building an industry that is well equipped and educated is a core value of mine as well as our companies. 

We have a few classes slated in already, but I am interested in what you think would be of value for us to teach at CTS University.  I would love to hear what you would like to learn, or possibly teach.  Stay tuned for our full slate of CTS University classes coming for 2010 and sign up for our new letter to stay current on all CTS Audio news.

Imagine, if you will, lying down on your couch in your new home theater. And with the touch of your finger tip, the window shades are drawn, the screen comes down, the lights dim, and the projector turns on and shows the movie you’ve been waiting to see… This is the beauty of the automation and system integration. The same thing can be done in commercial environments as well. Pushing one button can close the shade, lower the screen, turn on the projector, turn your audio system on – and without a single popping noise – and that just scratches the surface.  In a previous blog, I briefly mentioned how intelligent some products are. Projectors that can shut themselves  down if there’s a fatal error, amplifiers that  can monitor the status of speakers, DSPs (digital signal processors) that  can automatically switch to backup audio cables if the main audio cables are damaged.  Most importantly, those products report the occurrence in a certain protocol which can be monitored and can even generate an e-mail to whoever needs to know about it. And they can be programmed to remind you that it’s maintenance time, too.

But all the great features of automation and monitoring require intensive programming. It’s not as easy as rubbing an old lamp and having a Genie present you with 3 wishes.  But if you let your A/V vendor know what you functionality you’re looking for with your system, they will let you know if it’s possible – and within budget or not. At CTS Audio, we have factory trained and certified programmers to help you with this. So let us know what you have in mind!

Digital audio is just like all the other data chugging around computer networks these days.   Whether it be Cobranet, Ethersound, Aviom, Netcira, IQ…there are some 30-odd different flavors out there, and none of them talk to each other and they each need their own UTP cable to travel down- they don’t like to share.

Well…that was then…this is now…

Imagine this… Step One: Take a standard Ethernet cable and plug it straight into the Dante card on your Yamaha console.  Step Two:  Plug the other end of the cable into a LAN switch.  Step Three:  Take out your laptop and connect it to the same network as the console.  Step Four:  Turn on your audio or control software on your computer.  Step Four:  Send and receive audio to your heart’s content without any extra hardware. Can’t be done you say?  In fact, go ahead and use this same network to update your Facebook profile and send email.  With Dante, streaming pristine, low-latency, sample-accurate synchronized audio at any sample rate and bit depth of your choosing plus web surfing can all be achieved on the same local area network. 

In the next few weeks, I will be doing a series of blogs on the various applicational usages of Dante.  They include: Live Multitrack Recording, Virtual Soundcheck, and Digital Audio Networking.  So check back next week to see how Dante is quickly becoming the next big thing in digital audio!

Every company has them and yet very few elevate and bring out the best in them.  Having an intern program seems to be a great way to raise a team of young talent to become your go to guys.  They have no “bad habits” to break, therefore making them the best possible candidates to learn the way “we do it”.  Seems like a slam dunk, right?  Well I have been struggling with what the best way to get this program started. 

I have many friends in the industry, and am not sure I have once heard about a good intern program yet.   I see where the word intern just seems to mean a free worker.  I want to make sure that when CTS Audio unrolls an intern program, that we are teaching a skill that is usable whether you stay at CTS, or move on.  I do not want to have a place where teaching does not occur.  If you have a true desire to be in the live sound industry and are serious enough to trade your time for knowledge, then you should be treated fairly and given a skill for that time.  That is not to say that you should not start at a basic level and have to work your way up.  Putting your time in and doing some dirty work is necessary to earning your place in a company as long as there is a means to the end. 

That really begs the question that I am looking for the answer to.  What is it that we can teach to you that would make you want to intern at CTS Audio?

“Just take my word for it” is not a phrase that provides a lot of comfort and assurance when purchasing anything. If you buy a house, you want to see the home inspection report. If you buy a used car, you want to see the Car Fax report. Buying an installed A/V system should be no different. Whether you’re spending $50,000 on a new audio system for a small conference center or half a million dollars on a concert sound system for a performing arts venue, proof of performance isn’t something that should be taken for granted. If you’re buying the system and installation from a reputable vendor, they will have done their engineering homework in the selection and layout of equipment in order to achieve certain performance goals. In a sound system, they should be able to tell you things like the maximum SPL achievable and how many decibels of headroom are available. In a video projection system you should know what the maximum brightness on the screen is and what kind of contrast ratio you’ll realize with the ambient lighting present. Lighting and acoustics are no different. You are buying a certain result, and the vendor you’re buying it from should be able to prove at the end of the job that their system did what they claimed it would.  

Recently CTS Audio was called in to tame an extremely acoustically challenging gymnasium that had just been built for the Nashville Korean United Methodist Church. Upon taking baseline measurements, we found the RT60 time at 1KHz to be 6.3 seconds. This was so live that you couldn’t hold a conversation if you were more than a few feet away from the person you were talking to. After constructing an acoustical model and creating a solution to bring the reverb time down below 3 seconds, the church signed a contract but insisted on a proof of performance clause. Confident of our engineering, we agreed to an RT60 target of 2.8 seconds +/- .5 seconds or we had to fix it at our expense. When the acoustical materials were installed, final measurements were taken and we confirmed that we had met or beat our predictions at all frequencies of interest. The church had peace of mind going into the project that one way or another they were buying a result, and so should you. Do not be afraid to insist on proof of performance parameters in your contract with your A/V vendor. Be aware that you’ll most likely pay a little extra for this service because it represents extra work for your vendor, but in the end you’ll sleep easy at night knowing that you got what you paid for.

So what exactly is a mobile stage?  How can my event benefit from the use of a mobile stage?

These are just a couple of questions I get asked when talking to potential clients about mobile staging.  So in an effort to dispel a few myths, I give you the following challenges:

• Mobile stages aren’t large enough for my event
  • CTS Audio can provide two different options, depending on the size of the event.  For larger events, we have a 32X30 foot standard size with fully covered roof 20 ft from the stage deck.  For smaller events, we have a 24X20 foot standard size with fully covered roof 15 ft from the stage deck.   Both of these stages have the option of adding additional decks for more stage space.
• Mobile stages can’t hold enough weight
  • Our 32X30 foot stage has a roof capacity of 30,000 lbs, with a lifting capacity of 10,000 lbs
  • Our 24X20 foot stage has a roof capacity of 6,300 lbs
• Mobile stages damage my facility grounds
  • Our mobile stages have been set up on several professional baseball diamonds.
  • Here is an quote from the grounds keeper at a recent such event:

“Just wanted to let someone know what a pleasure it was to work with your guys the past couple days.  I’m the head groundskeeper in Fort Wayne and we had [the CTS Audio] crew come in for the Mercy Me concert.  They were more than willing to do anything I asked to protect the field and were just great to work with.”

-Mitch McClary

• Mobile stages cost too much
  • Our mobile stages can be set up in a minimal amount of time (1-4 hours) and require only one technician and up to two on-site laborers for most events.  Quick set up and low labor costs mean “real dollar savings” for you.
  • Offset production costs with advertising revenue.  Increase revenue and exposure for you and your affiliated sponsors utilizing eye-catching full stage banners.  CTS Audio can assist with graphics and production and advise you on potential revenue sources as value added services.

Whether your event is for 600 people or 6,000 people CTS Audio is your One Stop Shop to deliver the results you need for your event.