Stereo Enhancer Vst Plugin Free
- This free vst plugin goes a long way to improve your audio by eliminating a lot of the background hiss in your mic source. Subtract mode is an advanced noise suppression filter. It works by reducing the dynamic range of your microphone or audio source to eliminate noisy parts of the signal effectively.
- Download the Best Free Exciter / Enhancer Audio Plugins. Just click and download. The Antress Modern Plugins consists of several free VST effect plug-ins for Windows: Modern Compressor. Power On/Off b. ThrillseekerXTC. Equalizer Exciter / Enhancer.
- SPAN is a free real-time “fast Fourier transform” audio spectrum analyzer AAX, AudioUnit and Mastering VST plugin for professional sound and music production applications. For the most part it was derived from Voxengo GlissEQ dynamic parametric equalizer and reproduces its spectrum analysis functionality.
- Download Stereo Helper by Press Play Music Free Stereo Width, Stereo Signal Splitter, Stereo Enhancement VST, VST3, AU Plugin. Win 64Bit, Mac 64Bit.
- The free VST plugin version of Stereo Tool plays a short message ('This sound is processed by Stereo Tool') every couple of hours, but this limitation can be removed by registering Stereo Tool for only €35. The registered version also unlocks the Advanced Clipper feature. For full licensing details, check out the Stereo Tool registration page.
- Available for Download. Utility 10 Analog 8 Imaging 6 Modulators 6 Delay 5 Distortion 5 Filter 5 Chorus 4 Dynamics 4 EQ 4 Mid-Side 4 Stereo-Field 4 Synthesizer 4 Vintage 4 Algorithmic 3 Amp-Simulator 3.
Getting a wide stereo sound in mixes or recordings is one of the most desired techniques in music production.
And as there are actual ways you can accomplish this using recording techniques like Blumlein or mid-side techniques, we often find that we need to apply stereo widening to already recorded tracks within our DAW.
One of the best ways to do this is with a dedicated software plugin. Quite likely, your DAW may have something within the lines of a stereo widener, and there are many good quality paid versions out there.
But we decided to take a look at some of the best free stereo widener VST and AU plugins available for download in this guide. Let’s check ’em out!
Find more great gear here:
Free Stereo Width Plugins
Here we go over some of the most effective free stereo widening plug-instructor available, all of which can do a great job of making individual tracks bigger and wider.
Stereo Enhancer is a simple VST effect plug-in for convertingmono to stereo signals as well as for stereo widening. This is possible due to the several techniques such as multi-band frequency splitting and panning, phasing one of the channel etc. 4 built-in frequency splitter modes. Easy control with pop-up menus.
With simplified control and undeniably great sound, these free plug-ins are excellent alternatives to costly and impractical hardware solutions and esoteric studio techniques.
The List
Plugin Roundup
iZotope’s Ozone Imager is the free standalone plug-in version of the imaging technology found in the company’s own Ozone mastering suite. Although it has a much simpler set of controls than its more fully-featured counterpart, Ozone Imager is nevertheless capable of narrowing or widening the stereo image of your audio to a remarkably precise degree.
Like most of the components of Ozone, Imager provides immediate visual feedback that enables intuitive setting of the parameters. The plug-in even has a vectorscope and a correlation meter that aid in precision sound-staging during mixing and mastering.
Voxengo’s Stereo Touch employs mid/side coding in transforming the most basic mono sources into rich stereophonic tracks. Best suited to mono sources that don’t have a lot of sharp transients, it is especially effective for widening acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizer pads, and vocals. With the spacious and expansive “surround” produced by this plug-in, you no longer have to devote time and channel space to double tracking.
Stereo Touch also works on multi-channel input signals, processing each one independently as separate mono signals. The stereo streams are then combined to produce a single stereo signal at the output.
Whether you are looking for a quick way to add stereo imaging or you want to widen a mono source, Stereo Touch will deliver like a champ.
A1Audio’s A1StereoControl does exactly what it says on the tin: give you precise control over stereo imaging. Even though it is equipped only with a single knob, you can expand or limit your tracks’ stereo width to a remarkable degree.
One of the best things about A1StereoControl is how easily it helps you sidestep a common issue when “stereoizing” bass sounds. The plug-in has a “Safe Bass” algorithm that centers all the low frequencies below a user definable threshold. This keeps bass and other low-end sounds right at the center of the stereo spread, where they won’t cause any phasing issues.
Even without the dedicated mid/side controls found in other imaging plug-ins, A1StereoControl prevents your low end from causing any issues when collapsed to mono.
MeldaProduction’s MAutopan is more of a panning plug-in than a dedicated stereo imager, but it is quite a capable one at that. The plug-in employs a unique modulation system that consists of continuously adjustable oscillators. Each of these oscillators may combine predefined shapes, custom waveforms, and algorithmic post-processing.
The result is a tremendous degree of control by which you can define the stereo placement of your sounds.
MAutopan actually handles more than just mono and stereo sources. The plug-in is also capable of processing up to eight channels of surround audio, making it a useful tool for game and film audio production.
QuickQuak Audio’s UpStereo is a sort of classic in stereo imaging circles, with a set of simple controls that can make short work of stereoizing any mono source. It employs a fixed frequency EQ, a stereo widening unit, and a loud switch, all of which result in bigger, wider, and louder tracks.
Unlike most other stereo widening plug-ins, UpStereo comes with an option to push the sound into overdrive. Combined with the stereo widening capabilities of the unit, this makes it possible to produce individual sounds that stand out without the need for extensive processing.
Brainworx’s bx_solo is a free stereo imaging plug-in offered for free to everyone who signs up at Plugin Alliance. Employing the infinitely useful m/s processing technique, it gives you a surprising degree of control over the placement of sounds in the stereo spread.
A comprehensive range of solo features are included with the bx_solo, giving you the ability to hear the left, right, middle, and side channels while tweaking. This feature alone adds a lot of functionality to any DAW, very few of which allow for such flexibility.
Xfer Records’ Dimension Expander is a spatial expander modeled after the popular Boss/Roland Dimension D chorus effect. By splitting audio into four parts, flipping the phase of two streams and then delaying them, the plug-in produces rich, lush, and wide textures that retains punch and clarity.
Admittedly, the Dimension Expander is a bit of a one-trick pony. But the trick is a pretty damn impressive one.
And considering the relative rarity and cost of the Dimension D in the vintage market, this free plug-in will make a welcome addition to your suite of stereo imaging plug-ins.
Top Pick
The Ozone Imager is pretty much the one to beat in this roundup. Offering all the flexibility, control, and great sound that iZotope has become known for, it can handle most every stereo widening need you can think of and then some.
That being said, the Voxengo Stereo Touch, the A1StereoControl, and MAutopan all deserve special mention as well. Going well beyond the capabilities offered by most stereo imaging plug-ins, and or all of these three will find a welcome place in any mix engineer’s arsenal.
Last modification: 01/19/08 19:26
Dallas' Gear REVIEW
K-Stereo Ambience Processor vs. 'SHEPPi' Free Spatial Enhancer
| Algorithmix' K-Stereo Ambience Processor ($990.00) | Open Ambience Project's 'SHEPPi' Spatial Enhancer (free!) |
(click pics to enlarge) | |
'K-Stereo is a process that literally extracts the inherent ambience, space and depth in a recording and allows you to manipulate it.. I know this sounds implausible, but it can be done and there is a solid psychoacoustic (patent pending) basis for the principle. In mastering we often get recordings that are too small, and K-Stereo is one of the best cures for that disease because it does not affect the inherent mix, unlike typical M/S and other such 'widening' techniques. K-Stereo is totally natural and in addition, it improves the clarity and definition of the instruments and vocals as part of the psychoacoustics of the algorithm.'
(Bob Katz, Pro Audio Review, 8/2003)
..
'Widening of the stereo base is an attractive feature for stereo sets with closely spaced loudspeakers.. From this investigation it follows that the introduction of a small time delay in the crosstalk circuit shifts the regions with reinforcing localization cues in the direction of the listener, thus improving the localization of virtual sources in the widened stereo image.'
The Influence of Antiphase Crosstalk on the Localization Cues in Stereo Signals (Boers, 1983)
..
..I discovered about 10 years ago that a short delay (Haas) between 15-30ms, 1 channel inverted and perhaps a low pass filter can really widen things without destroying the mono compatibility or changing the mix. It just takes a TINY bit of the delay to really liven up things. Aside from that, a simple M-S matrix followed by some envelope manipulation and finally, an L-R matrix is all I use.'
(user wado1942 commenting on Gearslutz mastering board, 1/2009)
Let's be clear on something - I love Bob Katz. For those not familiar with his work as a mixer and mastering engineer of legend, Bob is one of a handful of guys (some others being Roger Nichols, The Lord-Alge brothers, George Massenburg, Rupert Neve, Alan Blumlein and Charles Dye) who have innovated, invented, educated and just plain helped set the standard for how modern recordings are made. It's just that I was re-reading Bob's book ('Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science, 2nd ed.') wondering about whether Bob's 'K' mixing system is all it's cracked up to be, when I stumbled across another term of his: 'K-Stereo'.
(Note to self - Is Bob planning to take over the best practices in the mastering world and label them all 'K' something-or-other? This reminds me of when Bob Metcalfe (of Ethernet and OSI networking model fame) was touring around the tech world trying to convince everyone that the old 7-layer model was passe, and we all needed to jump onboard his new Metcalfe 11-Layer Networking Model. In reality, the only thing passe about the 7-layer model was that it was in the public domain, and he was kicking himself for not having tied it up in some kind of intellectual-property wrapper. But I digress.)
In the audio world, we work from a fixed menu of ingredients beginning with Volume, Frequency and Time, working its way down into such specifics as delay, reverb, phase, modulation and distortion before hitting the general weirdness of psychoacoustic principles like masking, combination tones, Fletcher-Munson curves, HRTF plots and precedence effects. Many wonderful techniques considered 'trade secret' in their day (Flanging, anyone? ADT? Dither?) have since become standard practice and the guys who invented them (like Beatles' producer George Martin) have become legend.
K-Stereo was something different, though. Bob basically took a few mixing concepts already in use (these would include early reflections, ping pong delay, M/S processing and the precedence, or Haas effect), applied them all at once and took out a patent on it - while conveniently sidestepping everything that looked like prior art. The algorithm, which is a clever but fairly simple and straightforward psychoacoustic spatialization effect, has roots in at least one 1983 AES white paper besides theSpatializer patent (whose roots go back to 1982.) A more descriptive term for what Bob's doing might be the acronym 'SHEPPi', which stands for 'Stereo Haas Effect Ping Pong Inverter'. Yep, that's what it is. And it didn't take a patent to figure out - all it took were some basic signal processing techniques known (in patent legalese) 'to those skilled in the art.'
What SHEPPi describes is this. You set up a ping-pong delay with feedback of around 30mS, which is the sweet spot for the well-known Haas stereo widening effect. Then, in one of the crossfeed delay lines you put an inverter such that the artificial early reflections are bouncing around out of phase (exaggerating the wideness) and out of time with each other. Kaleidoscope plugin vst. Bob adds some extra control over this effect by determining whether the delay feedback ('Deep' switch) or single-channel crossfeed inverter ('Wide' switch) should be on or off. In addition, the K-Stereo process adds a couple of convenience touches easily simulated with other tools: an M/S matrix processor (also known as a 'shuffler') preceding the effect, and a post-effect EQ module for tailoring the synthetic reflections.
Open Ambience Project's SHEPPi Spatial Enhancer plugin (VST, Windows) does all of this. You can even use the plugin on an aux bus instead of the more typical track insert because SHEPPi gives you full control over the dry signal that's usually mixed in. (Try doing that with the Algorithmix plugin.)
How close is this implementation to the real thing? Extremely close. Listen and compare! Prior to now, I was reluctant about making the plugin public - but having since talked this over with a patent attorney (thanks, TS!) I've decided to go ahead with it. At some point I may end up making the source code available so that anyone can compile their own plugin without any IP concerns (source code is protected under the First Amendment, you see) but until then the most important part of the code, the core process, is outlined below. Click on Fig. 1 to read the original, orFig. 2 to see this effectmaker's implementation.
In practice, patent examiners only consider other patents and the books they have in their library for prior art, largely because the patent office has an elaborate classification system for inventions. This means that an increasing number of issued patents may be invalid, based upon prior art that was not brought to the examiner's attention. Once a patent is issued, it is very expensive to invalidate. (For more on this, seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain)
Meanwhile, let it be said that I'm making no money off this - writing this plugin was merely a fun project to get a few licks in programming for the SynthMaker development environment, and I'm a curious guy.
(Note: SHEPPi is a 32-bit VST plugin until such time as as DSP Robotics decides to update their development environment. In the meantime, please investigate the amazingly clever (and cheap) JBridge 32-to-64 bit VST adapter for Windows)
Free Stereo Enhancer Vst
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.(Yes, you're free to use the plugin in an unrestricted fashion on commercial and noncommercial music projects. Just don't think about selling the plugin itself or redistributing it without attribution - for more details, click the link.)
Download v1.05 Plugin (VST, Windows, 1.41MB)
'What a wonderful plugin you've made... I'd been figuring out the patent trying to do the same but it didn't work like the real k-stereo thing. I thank you very much for making it work well with very best regards'
- Arie Visser, www.studioavm.nl
' It's amazing how tweaking it just a little, the sound becomes fuller, cleaner, and more pleasing to listen to. I've tried it on my own recordings and commercial ones, everything sounds better.'
-Rafa, from Costa Rica
Ambience Comparison Demos Original Audio: YozaSS20duo.mp3 | |
| Algorithmix K-Stereo Plugin | SHEPPi Algorithm |
| Std +2dB.mp3 | Std +2dB.mp3 |
| Deep +2dB.mp3 | Deep +2dB.mp3 |
| Wide +2dB.mp3 | Wide +2dB.mp3 |
| DeepWide +2dB.mp3 | DeepWide +2dB.mp3 |
| Max Enhance.mp3 | Max Enhance.mp3 |
| Block diagram from Katz patent (fig. 1) | SynthMaker implementation (fig. 2) |
AES Preprint #1967 (Boers, 1983) - The Influence of Antiphase Crosstalk on the Localization Cues in Stereo Signals (.pdf)
US Patent #5,412,731 (Desper, 1995) - Automatic Stereophonic Manipulation System And Apparatus For Image Enhancement (.pdf)
US Patent #7,076,071 (Katz, 2006) - Process for enhancing the existing ambience, imaging, depth, clarity and spaciousness of sound recordings (.pdf)
Personal Observations:
Now the double-blind testing starts. When I was working on an early version of this plugin (no EQ yet) you could flip the phase of its output and it would actually sum to null against the original, which is as good as it gets. That said, working around the bugs in pre-v1.1.7 versions of SynthMaker was an adventure in itself - but since everything seems good and stable, just trust your ears and enjoy. Users running Windows 2000 and earlier may need to install Microsoft's GDIPlus DLL, availablehere.
Apologies for the lack of a user manual, but if you've already read the guide to Algorithmix's demo plugin (hint hint) you're pretty much on top of things.
Questions, Comments, Bugs -
If You'd Like To Support This Project
| SHEPPi is free to all, but former WikiLeaks whistle-blower Pfc. Chelsea (Bradley) Manning is not. If you found this plugin to be useful, won't you consider sending a little something her way? That's supporting REAL openness. Thanks for all your support! | Yes, I'm a friend of SHEPPi. Donate! |
Related Links:
http://www.algorithmix.com/en/kstereo.htm
http://www.digido.com/products/k-stereo.html
http://www.digido.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51:k-stereo-endorsements&catid=17:digital-domain&Itemid=81
http://www.audiomastersforum.net/amforum/index.php?topic=6878.0
http://broadcastengineering.com/audio/digital-domain-us-patent/
http://www.weiss.ch/dna1/dna1.html
http://www.z-sys.com/pp_6ch.html
http://www.proaudioreview.com/article/850
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/379198-stereo-widening-questions-pros.html
http://jeronimomachado.vilabol.uol.com.br/spatializer.htm
http://www.voxengo.com/product/msed/
Free Stereo Vst
'Highly Recommended!' - Sound On Sound (UK),May 2010.'Excellent mono compatibility'December 2011
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