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November/December 2022

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alo Vision is a realtime analysis tool for surround sound and immersive audio. It is a highly-customiz- able plug-in, with a set of seven modules intended to provide sound engineers with a better understanding of their immersive audio projects (up to 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos) and alerting them to any potential problems. The plug-in's skeleton has organization that is familiar to anyone who's been using Nugen Audio plug-ins. It has utility controls with access to presets at the top, and a bottom panel with settings, along with the update and user guide access buttons hidden behind the Nugen Audio company name. As this plug-in has no functionality that will change your sound, the top bar only has undo and redo buttons, a preset menu and the help button. The real action goes on in the main section of the window where the modules live. Every module has its own hamburger menu with a settings button, remove but- ton and maximize button. You enlarge or reduce the size of a module by dragging its borders with other modules. The workings of the modules them- selves are easy to understand. The Correlation Matrix, for example, displays the phase relationship between the chan- nels, using square cells colored according to the correlation value. Green represents "in phase" while red signifies "out of phase." A large arched meter shows what the phase relationship is between select- ed channel pairs in more detail. There's even an alert for when correlation drops below a user-defined threshold. The Correlation Web visualizes the same relationships in a different way. It uses a circular network of lines that represent each channel pair. When the phase relationship between two channels becomes anti-correlated, the corre- sponding lines lighten up. In my test setup, I had several of these lines briefly lit with a faint red — and the fainter, the better. The more intense the glow, the further out of phase the signals are. Halo Vision also has two radar-like modules — the Frequency Haze and Location Haze. The former displays the frequency content across the surround panorama, while the latter shows the energy distribution. Together, they make it extremely simple to see wheth- er, for example, the loudest parts that are also the ones with the highest pitch are concentrated in one area of the surround or 3D space. Obviously, there is also an FFT spectrum view with all channels either shown in the same color, so you get an overview of the total of all the signals, or in an overlaid fashion, with each chan- nel showing in its own semi-translucent color. In my opinion, this module is the least useful of all when all channels carry signals that are close to each other in terms of spectral distribution. The reason is that, even semi-translucent colors aren't easy to tell apart when they're all super-imposed. Another obvious module is the set of peak meters that provides a dB level meter per channel. Finally, Halo Vision comes with a time- code view that displays the timecode readout based on the playback position of the host application. VERDICT Nugen Audio's Halo Vision is one of the very few professional-grade analysis tools for surround sound. Its modules are all easy to use and to interpret, with — in my opinion at least — the exception of the FFT spectrum in its overlaid mode when all signals are close to each other in terms of spectral energy. Yet, the other modules report enough information in easy-to-view formats for Halo Vision to allow sound engineers to pinpoint problems far easier and faster than when they have to rely solely on their ears. NUGEN AUDIO'S HALO VISION BY ERIK VLIETINCK ERIK@ THECONTENTGAME.COM A SUITE OF TOOLS FOR MONITORING SURROUND & IMMERSIVE AUDIO PROJECTS H REVIEW www.postmagazine.com 36 POST NOV/DEC 2022 VITAL STATS MANUFACTURER: Nugen Audio PRODUCT: Halo Vision PRICE: $299 WEBSITE: https://nugenaudio.com

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