After having been awarded an Italian patent in 2022, Outline’s technology for Warped Finite Impulse (WFIR) filter has now been granted by the European Patent Organisation.

Outline European patent for WFIR filter designDeveloped in-house by the company’s engineering team, the design of Outline’s Warped Finite Impulse Response (WFIR) filters is now protected by an international patent – as European Patent EP3763134 was recently granted to Outline by the European Patent Office.

WFIR filters are a distinctive feature of Outline’s Newton, employed in complex applications before huge audiences worldwide to drive a palette of loudspeakers from different manufacturers as genuinely a brand-agnostic processor.

The designation of ‘warped finite impulse response’ technology for sound processing applications has been the subject of several patents across the professional audio and audiology sectors – a broader context that further underlines the significance of the European grant now awarded to Outline.

‘Substantial improvements over traditional FIR filters are intrinsic to WFIR filters, which – thanks to their semi-logarithmic scale operation, in line with the very nature of human hearing – maintain maximum filtering resolution over the entire audio range – even in case of increasingly high sampling frequencies’, the company says.

‘Taming the high impact on computing power associated with traditional FIR filters, which Newton nonetheless more-than-adequately provides for, WFIR technology also allows the use of raised cosine filters for a superior level of accuracy in equalisation. Add to this the further benefit of a 10X-res factor at mid-low frequencies, where it matters most in live sound – all the while being impervious to the latency issues that traditionally affect FIR filters, too, and you realise what tangible benefits Outline Newton empowers its users-base with.’

While the technical performance and behaviour of WFIR filters can be demonstrated with T&M platforms (for instance, Audio Precision toolsets), users in the field claim the audible advantages are evident in real-world applications.

More: https://outline.it