Jeff Mullen, an Emmy® Award-winning sound designer and mixer based in Washington, D.C. and founder of Sonichead has adopted Nugen Audio's Halo Upmix tool for automated upmixing of stereo audio to 5.1/7.1 surround. Jeff now uses Halo Upmix to produce both a 5.1 upmix as well as a stereo mix for a wide range of projects.

Jeff has more than a decade of professional audio experience, working in both long-form and short-form video content as well as commercials, promos, in 5.1 surround and stereo. In 2015, he was on the team that produced the Daytime Emmy-winning 2014 preview campaign for PBS. For him the ability to create an upmix to 5.1 surround from stereo components is now a standard requirement for many Sonichead projects, and Jeff, not unsurprising, is usually under a very tight timeframe to produce the mix. He had tried other upmixing tools but for him they tended to add unnatural reverb and delay to the original signal. Jeff told us...

Other upmixing tools would produce a 5.1 output that sounded very different from the original. I was spending too much time tweaking parameters to make the upmix sound natural and bring it up to my clients' quality standards. Nugen Audio has a stellar reputation for audio plug-ins that are technically advanced and produce very high-quality output, so when I heard early last year that they were releasing an upmixing product, I knew it would be something special, and I have not been disappointed — Halo Upmix is a tremendous improvement over anything else on the market. With Halo, the phasey artefacts, strange reverbs, and delays are now gone and the mid-range is no longer over-hyped. In fact, the upmix sounds identical to the original stereo source material.

As a beta user of Halo Upmix, Jeff has used Halo Upmix on stereo ambiences and backgrounds for a range of projects. For him, Halo's GUI not only gives him an 'at-a-glance' view of upmix parameters but also enables him to ensure that the downmix output precisely matches the source material. In addition, he now relies on Halo Upmix's feature to be able to automate every parameter as well as Halo's dialogue isolation feature, which offers the ability to keep vocals anchored in the center channel in a surround mix.

Preview: Nugen Audio Halo Upmix Plug-in

You can read how Mike got on with the Halo Upmix in his unique preview review. Mike wrote...

I have been playing with it now for a few days and it has really grown on me. I love the Surroundscope. It is so useful to get a visual indication of where the audio is in the surround sound field. It really helps to confirm what my ears are hearing.

To have a down mix option built into the plug-in to check down mix compatibility is an inspired move. Without resorting to the manual the controls are intuitive. You can click on the channel nodes and solo each one. Alternatively on the meters, clicking on the label, will mute that channel and these functions can be modified in the plug-in's settings page.

Halo Upmix From Nugen Audio Saves The Day For Team Member Alan Sallabank

You can also read about how Nugen Audio's Halo Upmix plugin saved the day for a charity client of team member Alan Sallabank. Alan concludes...

By being able to ride these parameters in such an intuitive fashion, with the display giving me reassuring visual feedback, Nugen Halo gives unprecedented levels of control in my opinion. Nothing else on the market is as intuitive, easy to understand, and folddown safe.

Thanks Nugen! You made a kids charity very happy!