Outline has released v.93 firmware for the Newton digital hub and software version 1.8.1 for the proprietary Dashboard remote control application.
Principal improvements for users include alerts and notifications to immediately signal any major event (for example, input back fallback, clock change, power supply fault etc) within Newton and/or Dashboard, and simultaneously log the event to a database; permanent links (in addition to the groups and temporary links already available); additional filtering plus various safety and reliability enhancements to the user interfaces; and further signal backup options – the ‘fallback’ feature with additional safety request to reset the previous status after a fallback event.
Also part of v.93 is a Dante backup implementation, a new option for fallback strategy to Dante sources, and a new Dante-specific feature Sync To External that allows connection to an external clock in a Dante network.
Input from Ian Nelson of Adlib Audio in the UK and German system technician and teacher Michael Häck has been central to the new releases.
‘I choose Newton as my preferred system processing platform because its feature set and audio quality ticks so many boxes for me, but the new software takes it up another level,’ Häck comments. ‘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.
‘However the new linking options, with the ability to colour-code groups of linked functions, really makes a difference in a live system setup and tuning scenario, it’s very intuitive. I’m already thinking about what I would like in the next release.’
‘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,’ Nelson adds. ‘The new linking functionality in particular allows us to (for example) 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.
‘We also felt that critical error reporting that could do with some improvement. 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.
