Penteo vs NUGEN Halo vs Illusonic vs Max1mus: Upmixing Compared - with Gert Keunen

Part 2 of my series with Gert Keunen — author of Stereo Was a Nice Try, producer, and conservatory educator — is here, and this time we tackle immersive upmixing (a.k.a. upscaling) plugins. Before touching a single plugin, we take on the question my comment section never stops asking: should you even upmix at all? Apple discourages it, plenty of engineers push back on it, and Gert doesn't hold back with a professional's honest take — including where upmixing is genuinely the wrong move, and the specific cases where it's not just acceptable but genuinely useful, from spatial remixing to adding space and movement on individual instrument tracks.

From there we work through several of the immersive upmixers worth knowing right now, spanning the full range from the pro-grade industry standard to research-driven free tools and affordable, creator-focused options. We get into the things that actually decide whether a plugin makes it into a real session: sound quality and decorrelation, channel latency (a bigger deal than most people realize), format support like 7.1.4 versus 9.1.6, DAW integration quirks, pricing, and educational access. This is the second and final episode of the series, so if you haven't seen the panning episode yet, start there. And yes — we each land on a pick by the end. Subscribe for more, and tell us in the comments what you'd like us to cover next.