Illusonic Plugin Suite: Professional Spatial Audio Tools You Need to Try

In this video, I take a first look at the Illusonic plugin suite—a set of four immersive audio plugins from a Swiss company that's been in the immersive audio consulting space since 2006 but is new to plugin development. The suite includes an upmixing plugin, a binaural rendering plugin, an immersive de-reverb (Clarity) plugin, and an Ambisonics A/B decoder. Since these plugins are still in beta, they're currently available for free if you contact Illusonic to join their beta testing program. I primarily focus on the upmixing and binaural rendering plugins, demonstrating how they can convert a stereo track to 9.1.6 and then render it binaurally. What really stands out is the extensive list of supported formats, including Sony's 13.1 layout used for Sony 360RA—something I rarely see in other plugins.

My preliminary verdict is that these are a very welcome addition to the immersive audio space, offering features you won't find elsewhere. The upmixing plugin is particularly impressive with its flexibility and format support. However, the documentation is quite sparse at this stage, which makes it difficult to fully understand what's happening under the hood. My main feature request would be the addition of head tracking via OSC for the binaural renderer—this would make it the first plugin capable of monitoring Sony 360RA through head-tracked binaural audio. Overall, it's a very promising start, and I'm looking forward to seeing how these plugins develop once they're officially released.