Thursday, April 16, 2026 — Edition No. 61 — The Cornmill Intelligencer

← Past Editions · Edition No. 61 · Thursday, April 16, 2026

Today’s outlook: Storm Dave blows through — community spirit, analogue warmth, and open-weight optimism in the forecast

News Clydebank

More Than 300 Brave Storm Dave for Clydebank's Easter Celebration

While organisers across West Dunbartonshire cancelled their events, Flourishing Faifley's volunteers refused to let the weather win — and their community showed up in force

While Storm Dave battered Scotland with 70mph gusts and sideways rain over Easter weekend, more than 300 people in Clydebank did what Clydebank does best — they turned up anyway.

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Audio Equipment

DiGiCo Doubles Up: The Quantum 225 DS Adds a Second Screen — and Existing Owners Can Upgrade

The new dual-screen variant of DiGiCo's workhorse compact console brings expanded visual feedback and an optional Pulse power boost — with a hardware upgrade path for the thousands of Q225s already in the field.

By Damien Day

If you've worked a festival changeover, a multi-act theatre run, or a touring rig in the last five years, chances are you've stood behind a DiGiCo Quantum 225. That familiar 17-inch centre touchscreen and open left-panel bracket — just the right size for a laptop, a KLANG:kontroller, or a well-thumbed show file binder — has become one of the most common sights in live sound.

Now DiGiCo has given the console a significant evolution. The Quantum 225 DS (Dual Screen), announced on 31 March 2026, replaces that bracket with a second integrated 17-inch, full-colour, daylight-bright TFT multitouch screen, and scatters 41 mini TFT displays across the worksurface for channel information, metering, bank selection, and macro control.

For engineers running complex shows, the practical difference is immediate. A second screen means you can keep your channel overview on one display while running snapshots, matrix routing, or effects on the other — without flipping between views mid-show. During festival changeovers, when the clock is ruthless and the next band's engineer is already hovering, that extra screen real estate translates directly into speed and confidence.

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AI Model Releases

OpenAI Opens the Door: New GPT-OSS Models Let Anyone Run Powerful AI on Their Own Machine

The company behind ChatGPT has released two open-weight models under a permissive licence — and it could change who gets to use cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

By Helen Cooper

For years, if you wanted access to OpenAI's most capable artificial intelligence, you had one option: pay for it through their cloud. That changed in August 2025, when the company released GPT-OSS — a family of open-weight models that anyone can download, run locally, and use for free.

It's a significant shift, and one worth understanding even if you've never written a line of code in your life.

GPT-OSS comes in two sizes. The larger model, GPT-OSS-120B, has 117 billion parameters and performs close to OpenAI's own paid o4-mini model on reasoning tasks. The smaller version, GPT-OSS-20B, delivers results comparable to o3-mini — and can run on a laptop with just 16 gigabytes of memory.

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Audio Equipment

SSL's Oracle Console Finally Delivers the Holy Grail of Analogue Mixing: Instant Recall

Solid State Logic's flagship Oracle console eliminates decades of compromise between analogue warmth and digital convenience — and the professional audio world is taking notice

By Damien Day

For as long as recording studios have existed, engineers have faced a painful choice: the irreplaceable warmth and depth of an analogue mixing console, or the convenience and speed of digital recall. Choose analogue, and you accept the ritual of recall sheets — meticulously photographing or noting the position of every knob, fader, and switch before a session ends, then spending hours manually resetting them when the client returns for revisions.

Choose digital, and you gain instant recall at the cost of something harder to define but impossible to ignore — that analogue character that has shaped the sound of recorded music for over half a century.

Solid State Logic believes you no longer have to choose. The Oxford-based company's new Oracle console, which won the 2026 TEC Award for Large Format Console after its debut at NAMM in January, delivers what engineers have dreamed of since the 1970s: a fully analogue mixing console with instant, complete recall of every setting.

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News Clydebank

Storm Dave Meets Its Match: Hundreds of Clydebank Families Defy the Tempest for Easter Triumph

Gazebos took flight, wellies sank deep and chocolate eggs rolled down Faifley Road — but nothing could stop the community's biggest Easter bash in living memory

By Damien Day

When 40mph gusts tore across Faifley on Saturday morning, organisers of the annual Clydebank Easter Event feared the worst. By lunchtime, they had their answer: hundreds of rain-lashed, wellie-clad locals, refusing — absolutely refusing — to let Storm Dave steal their chocolate.

"I've never seen anything like it," said event coordinator Margaret Docherty, wiping hailstones from her clipboard. "We had a gazebo take off like a kite over Faifley Community Centre. A wee boy caught it. I think he deserves a knighthood."

The event, now in its seventh year, had been billed as a gentle Easter egg hunt and family fun day. What it became was the stuff of Clydebank legend.

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Audio Equipment

LG Sound Suite: The Modular System That Could Finally Bring Dolby Atmos to Everyone

With up to 27 configurations and no PhD in acoustics required, LG's FlexConnect-powered system promises to take immersive audio mainstream

By Damien Day

For years, setting up a proper Dolby Atmos system at home has meant wrestling with speaker placement charts, running cables through walls, and accepting that your living room would need to resemble a recording studio. LG's new Sound Suite, the world's first modular audio system powered by Dolby Atmos FlexConnect, wants to change all that — and it might just pull it off.

The genius of Sound Suite is its modular approach. At its simplest, you can start with the H7 soundbar ($999/£900) and enjoy 5.1.3-channel Atmos sound from a single unit. When the budget allows, add a pair of M5 wireless surround speakers ($249 each) or the beefier M7s ($399 each). Fancy more rumble? Drop in the W7 wireless subwoofer ($599). The system scales all the way up to a full 13.1.7-channel configuration — 27 possible arrangements in total — without ever asking you to rewire your home.

This buy-as-you-go flexibility is what sets Sound Suite apart from traditional home cinema packages where you're committed to the full system from day one.

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What's On Glasgow

Glasgow Welcomes WOMAD: The World's Music Comes to Kelvingrove

Scotland's first-ever WOMAD festival lands in Glasgow this July, adding another jewel to a summer already sparkling with the Commonwealth Games and 850th anniversary celebrations

By Helen Cooper

There are cities that host festivals, and then there's Glasgow — a city that is a festival. This July, Scotland's largest city adds another brilliant flourish to what is shaping up to be the most culturally ambitious summer in its history, as WOMAD makes its Scottish debut in the heart of Kelvingrove Park.

WOMAD Glasgow — the World of Music, Arts and Dance — will take over the park on Friday 3 and Saturday 4 July, bringing a globe-spanning programme of music, dance, food, workshops and talks to one of the city's most beloved green spaces. It is the first time the legendary festival has crossed the border into Scotland in its 44-year history.

\"We are so excited about WOMAD's first visit to Scotland and to Glasgow — a festival and a city that fit hand in glove,\" said Chris Smith, Director of WOMAD. \"A match that lives and breathes culture, music and creativity together.\"

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