By Cory Choy

I’m a big Nugen fan. In fact, Halo UpMix is one of my favorite plugins and one that I use on almost every 5.1 project I work on. It is a simple, elegant plugin that allows me to move much of my stereo design to a surround environment quickly and flawlessly. I love it. It looks good, it sounds good, it’s well thought-out and it runs smoothly. So when I was given the chance to review another Nugen product, Halo Vision, I was very excited.

Halo Vision
While I know that RTFM (which stands for read the f-ing manual) is the real way to do things, I also know that these days, all the cool kids are just taking things out of the box and clicking everywhere. Let’s see where that takes us.

I fired up Halo Vision on the surround mix for my feature film Esme, My Love. The software defaults to “All Views.”

According to Nugen, Halo Vision performs comprehensive analysis of 3D and immersive audio. The Nugen site describes it as “a variety of modules that provide audio pros with a clearer understanding of every aspect of their audio, allowing for precise and confident decision-making and troubleshooting, and pinpointing problem areas which might be missed using ears alone.”

So basically, it’s advertised as extensive metering for the surround, Ambisonics and Dolby Atmos sound worlds. But now that I think about it, Atmos has more than the maximum 7.1.2 that Halo Vision supports, so Halo Vision would only be good for examining parts of the full Atmos mix at a time. I don’t work in Atmos (I use Ambisonics for VR and 5.1 for theater), so that’s not a problem for me.

Like UpMix, Halo Vision is immediately intuitive and simple to use. It looks and feels like a modern plugin. In this review, I’m going to run through all the modules one by one.

Basics
Basics provides a standard-looking setup — surround meters and a clock. It’s nice, but there’s nothing that my DAW Reaper doesn’t already provide for me.

Center Channel Vision

Center Channel Vision
Again, this is a beautiful rendering. The bottom is what I would see when I do a frequency analysis and metering of the center channel (I assume), but it’s nothing that I don’t already have. And I’m not sure I understand what this thing is on the top. There seem to be lines emitting from the selected channel to the others, and I guess it’s showing the relationships somehow? OK, enough of this just clicking away stuff. It’s time to RTFM. Aha! “The Correlation Web is another way of visualizing the phase relationships between each audio channel. The view consists of a network of channels with an interconnecting line between each pair. When the phase relationship between two channels becomes anti-correlated, the corresponding line lights up. The further out of phase the two signals are, the more intense the colour becomes.”

Besides my delight in the British spelling of “colour,” this clarifies things quite a bit. This module lets you know about phasing issues. This is especially important if you were planning on doing a fold-down or downmix to stereo. I personally like to do separate stereo and surround mixes when possible, so most often this won’t be an issue, but I like the idea of being able to see phasing since it’s not something folks catch 100% of the time off the bat.

Correlation

Correlation
This seems to be all about phasing, and it’s an interesting way of looking at things. I feel this is going to be a lot more important for music mixes than theater mixes, but that’s just my gut. It does make me wonder how much it matters if the LFE has phasing issues and what they end up doing. LFE is still the most confusing of the channels for me because, despite my room being calibrated to theater specs by Dolby, in most of the movies I mix that are played in theaters, the LFE feels different depending on venue, even though they are all technically calibrated the same.

Frequency Inspection
It seems like I’m looking at multiple channels at once in the frequency analyzer. I wish I had something that explained which color referred to what. It’s quite beautiful, and I would consider using it as a visualizer for a performance, but I’m not sure it brings anything new to the table for me.

Frequency Overview

Frequency Overview
Frequency Overview seems very similar, and other than just showing combined data I’m pretty sure that it’s basically the same as above.

I don’t find this super-useful since I use my ears for most things, and generally I use single-channel frequency monitors to scan for high-end and low-end issues in my premix. I guess it’s nice seeing the differences from the front and surround speakers. I guess “top” only comes into play if you’re doing 7.1.2, and I’m doing 5.1 at the moment.

Haze
Haze is my favorite visual representation so far because it allows you to intuitively see the sound intensity in the 5.1 space. I would use this to see how sounds are playing — particularly music and sound effects. It’s really nice, and it’s not something that I already have in my DAW. I could see this as a particularly useful tool when working with a director if they had questions about what the mix was doing.

In this picture, you can see a sharp spike of SFX for a jump scare in the center, left and right, with the music floating all around elsewhere. I like this one!

Final Thoughts
Halo Vision is elegant, and I like Haze (which I would definitely use for Ambisonics mixes) and the phasing/correlation tools, but it’s not something I would use often if mixing by myself.

It is a wonderful way to visually translate some of my mixing decisions to a director, and I’m excited to try it out in that capacity. And if there were phasing issues, I think it would be a really great way to spot them quickly. I don’t have a ton a of phasing issues in the environment I work in (a calibrated room), but I could see it being useful when taking a mix from a non-calibrated room and troubleshooting it. Maybe as a sound mixer, I just prefer to use my ears as much as possible as opposed to my eyes.

So while this plugin is nice, I don’t see it as essential to my workflow like I do Nugen’s Halo UpMix and Nugen’s spatial reverb Paragon, both of which are pretty much indispensable.

Cory Choy is an Emmy Award-winning sound mixer at Silver Sound in New York City.