NUGEN Audio Halo Downmix

Precise surround control, versatile downmix balancing and mix monitoring for accelerating and enhancing your surround productivity. Halo Downmix is the glue that brings your workflow together, allowing you to deliver in surround and stereo with ease and without compromise.

Applications include:

• Standard and custom surround to stereo downmixing
• Surround re-balancing
• Simultaneous surround/stereo workflow
• Immediate and versatile surround/downmix monitoring
• Downmix rescue
• Surround restoration

Expert Surround-to-Stereo
Halo Downmix provides a highly creative solution for precise downmixing of feature-film or 5.1 mixes to stereo. Intuitive, visual controls for relative levels, timing, and direct vs. ambient sound balance allow uprecedented fine-tuning, delivering accurate downmixes that are no longer limited by typical in-the-box coefficients-based processes.

A standard downmix is usually generated by simply mixing together the surround output according to standard downmix coefficients, however, this can often lead to unsatisfactory results, particularly if legacy upmix practices have been used to generate the original surround mix. Halo Downmix can be quickly employed to mitigate these issues eg. controlling excessive diffuse sound from added artificial reverberation, or removal of delay artefacts introduced in the rear channels.

Halo Downmix can be quickly deployed to produce a more controlled, coherent stereo mix.
Typical applications include:

• Stereo Mix production for Television within a Surround workflow.

• Rapidly producing a controlled, precise stereo downmix of a 7.1 feature film.

• Generating a stereo mix from surround where no stereo recording exists.

• Producing stereo interim listening mixes in a surround workflow.

Fine Tune Existing Surround material
Adjust existing 5.1 or 7.1 mixes in surround-to-surround mode. Levels of individual channels, and balance of direct vs. diffuse sound can be adjusted to fine tune or re-balance existing surround audio where access to the original mix is not possible.

Parallel Surround/Stereo Downmix workflow
Halo Downmix can also be used in conjunction with the included Receive plug-in to enable a parallel surround/stereo workflow.
This workflow allows for rapid A/B listening checks between surround and stereo downmix.

Applications include:

• Optimising a surround mix for better stereo downmix (standard coefficients)

• Harmonising surround and stereo experiences, delivering a separate downmix

• Harmonising surround and stereo to produce a modified surround mix and stereo downmix

Flexible, intuitive interface

• 7.1 and 5.1 modes
• Advance and compact modes
• Quick select ‘in-place’ monitoring of stereo and surround
• Quick linked solo and mute at every stage

Powerful control

• Ambient vs direct sound balance
• Automatic rear channel delay detection
• Surround input width control
• Rear channel shelf filters
• Downmix Low Frequency handling
• Highly customisable interface

Reliable metering

• Full input and output level metering
• Direct numerical entry of all gain offsets
• Adjustable meter colour splits
• Surround energy distribution visualisation