Outline has announced the immediate availability of v.93 firmware for their unique NEWTON digital hub, in addition to software version 1.8.1 for their proprietary Dashboard remote control application.
This is the latest operational upgrade following the successful launch of NEWTON at prolight+sound 2018 and was largely based on input from Outline’s international group of NEWTON users, who have thoroughly road-tested the units in a wide variety of applications.
The full list of new features can be found on the Outline Newton’s website but the principal improvements from a user viewpoint are; immediate alerts and notifications that are logged onto the database, permanent links, filtering implementations, Signal backup implementation that includes a fallback feature for additional safety, Dante backup implementation and Clock implementation.
Input from Ian Nelson of Adlib Audio in the UK and German System Technician and teacher Michael Häck was central to the new releases.
Häck commented: “I’m always looking forward, hitting manufacturers and hire companies to make the next step. I choose Newton as my preferred system processing platform because of its feature set and audio quality ticks so many boxes for me, but the new software takes it up another level. Some of my suggestions were fairly simple display options, such as not having to re-size EQ windows, retaining a phase trace window when I close and then reopen an EQ pane and even things like numbering inputs and outputs to make navigation simpler.”
Nelson remarked: “Having used the Outline Newton 16+8 as both a festival matrix system and system processor over the 2018 season, we identified a number of features that we felt would be of benefit to Engineers using Newton in the field. The new linking functionality, in particular, allows us to programme a One Button option to mute or un-mute all of the various inputs from a particular console. The link can also be turned off temporarily so that a gain adjustment could be made to only one channel but then easily turned back on again following the adjustment. We also felt that critical error reporting that could do with some improvement.”
Nelson concluded: “In the new release, we have much greater visibility of system-essential messages to the Dashboard software. Similarly, we requested Dante input failure detection, plus the ability to clock the Dante card from an external source. The Newton is now one of very few devices that will successfully detect a Dante audio failure and then fall back to secondary non-Dante input.”