This two-night event starts the first night with Winfrey offering the inspirational story of her life's journey. She speaks about identifying life's purpose and leads exercises on taking action to reach goals. The second night, Oprah introduces motivational speakers from her network, who each give their own monologues in turn. Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, pastor Rob Bell and OWN TV personality Iyanla Vanzant are joined in some cities by alternative-medicine guru Deepak Chopra as well as DJ performances.
With the majority of the audio originating from the speakers and DJ performances, input count is small, under 30 channels, but when combined with the other performances elements, the show became a real undertaking. "They [the Oprah Tour] have a lot of video content," explains CTS vice president Mike Taylor. "It's a very complicated show in terms of video cueing and audio because of all of the sources."
The real challenge for this tour was generating a high-quality audio feed to ensure that all inspirational messages were heard both in the venue and for future TV Broadcasts and DVD's. "Most, if not all of the show, is being recorded for TV, so we wanted to pass along the highest quality audio," adds Schwarz. "They're just taking analogue audio output back to the video world but they've noted how clean and warm it sounds and the dynamic range is fantastic."
Though this was Schwarz's first major tour where he was working with the L500, he had a chance to experience the dramatic difference in sound quality at a few previous CTS events and knew it would be an asset to this minimalist production. "The very first time I heard SSL Live, we had a show in a stadium and there was a moment with a person singing and playing the acoustic guitar," Schwarz says. "I've done plenty of shows in stadiums with many different consoles and the very first thing I noticed with this one, was the clarity and the top end 'air' on it. I've never heard that, especially in a space that large with that much reverb time in the room. The clarity and the 'air' on the top end are remarkable."
(Jim Evans)
