Adlib enjoys busy summer with Outline Newton
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Adlib’s senior engineer Ian Nelson takes up the story: “For this summer’s festival commitments we’ve effectively used our Newton units in one of two ways - either as a festival console matrix system or as a full system controller. For the former, a single Newton device was configured as a central hub, bringing together the outputs of our dual house consoles (running as an A/B system to facilitate band changeovers) plus multiple guest consoles and our small ‘VT’ desk that deals with VT, DJs and announcements.
“The two house consoles are configured to provide PA Left, Right and Sub on both analogue and AES with the VT console sending L&R on AES into the system. We allowed for two guest consoles to be connected at any one time and these could send us anything from L+R to L+R+Sub+Fill, also on both analogue and AES.
“We also used a MADI A-D/D-A convertor to expand the analogue input capability of the system, which provided an additional 16 analogue inputs, eight AES and eight analogue outputs, connected to the NEWTON via co-ax. Our matrix was then set up to handle all 16 inputs from the various console sources, routed as appropriate to a total of 14 outputs for all zones of the main PA plus broadcast and record feeds.”
This setup was used very successfully at BBC Radio 1 Biggest Weekend Scotland, in Glasgow at the TRNSMT Festival, the Rewind Festivals Scotland, North and South respectively, both Reading and Leeds Festivals and the Greenman Festival.
Ian continues: “In the second scenario, we used our Newton as a full system controller. I prototyped our first ‘Newton Control Rack’ and this was given a run out at the Liverpool International Beatles Convention, used to process the PA system supplied for the Bootleg Beatles at the Liverpool Echo Arena.
“At this show it was used to drive the entire PA and was also integrated into our measurement systems to provide analysis feeds to SMAART. Control over the Newton was via a MacBook Air connected to a wireless access point via Cisco network switches.”
Outline's Newton product specialist Fernando Rey Mendez will be at the PLASA show at London Olympia on Monday, 17 September.
(Jim Evans)
