The son of a professional musician, Dr Rajesh Khade stepped away from his medical career to maintain his family passion as a sound engineer – or more precisely, a system engineer and official Smaart Trainer – in his home country of India. In recent years, Khade’s work in the audio field has enabled him to build up considerable experience with major PA brands, worked as a system engineer for numerous events with major acts across India, as well as holding his own system engineering courses.
He became a Smaart Instructor in 2019 and hosts training sessions throughout India in English, Hindi and Marathi. This work brought him into contact with German system technician and Smaart Instructor Michael Häck, who introduced him to Outline’s new Newton processor, which he used during Stuttgart’s 2018 Jazz Open Festival, one of the largest jazz festivals in Europe.
‘I’d been constantly on the look-out for a processor for more than a year, but was undecided on which to go for, as each one lacked some features,’ Khade explains. ‘But, when I first got to know about Outline Newton, through the Smaart API integration feature, and I went through its specs, I was mind-blown, as it definitely ticked all the boxes in my list.’
Following some more insight from Häck, Khade decided to definitely go for it, even without being able to have a demo unit in India. ‘What appeals to me the most is its use as a central system processor: driving, controlling and processing all the PA components, with the ability to take in multiple consoles when in multi-band scenarios, flawlessly run back-up consoles on projects where redundancy is of utmost importance, and switch between them seamlessly,’ he says.
‘The no-latency WFIR filters and all-pass filters in particular will be extremely useful to me, as I often combine different models and brands of speakers on the same setups, and getting them to work together has been a problem in the past, but with Newton I’m sure it’ll be plain sailing from now on! Also, the multi-format I/O option has taken away all that worrying, planning and arranging for multiple devices, as interconnections are all packed into a 1U-high rack device.’
Apart from its processing and hardware capabilities, Khade stresses that Newton particularly impressed him with its amazingly user-friendly GUI of the Dashboard software. ‘Almost everything is just a click away, unlike many others, where to run the same function I would have to navigate through multiple menus. Newton is literally a one-stop solution to all my system engineering needs and I really look forward to deploying it on all my projects this upcoming season and, apart from applications in the field, Newton is definitely now an integral part of my training rig for all my Smaart training sessions.’
