I’m doing my first mix in 5.1 and it made me realize that I had a wrong assumption; that all plugins were channel agnostic and they were capable of handling as many channels as the project has.
Well, apparently most of them are just stereo. Even some that come in the same package, like Fabfilter’s Pro Bundle, are a mixed bag, with the EQ and Limiter being surround capable (at least 5.1), and the compressor and mastering plugins being just stereo.
So what happens if you put a stereo mastering plugin as an insert in the main 5.1 bus? Does it work for only left and right and the other channels just pass through untouched?
And for those of you who work in 5.1, what are the best plugins for mastering, within a reasonable price?
I feel this would be entirely up to you. You can give them a go since you already paid for them.
You can see whether a plugin supports surround by looking at the routing tab of the insert fx section in the channel settings.
The first plugin is Cubase’s stock compressor on a 5.1 bus. You see 6 connectors. The plugin below is a 3rd party compressor only for stereo use. It has only 2 out of 6 channels connected.
If I didn’t have Ozone 11, there would be just one thing, which for just one purpose as far as I can tell. I’m looking for the equivalent of stereo mastering plugins but that work in 5.1. To name a few, Ozone 11, Fabfilter’s Pro-MB, bx Masterdesk Classic, Shadow Hills Class A Mastering Comp, etc.
Those plug-in categories are determined by each manufacture for their plugs. You are unlikely to see lots of items listed there as most of tools you use while mastering aren’t exclusively used for mastering. You see a dithering plug listed because typically that only gets used when mastering. But you don’t see any compressors listed, even though most mastering is going to use compression. I wouldn’t put much weight on the manufacture’s categorization - its often as much about marketing as anything else.
Many (most? all?) of the Steinberg plug-ins seem to support 5.1. As @Johnny_Moneto pointed out you can easily check and see for yourself. Below I randomly loaded some different plug-ins on a 5.1 Group Channel, and as you can see they all support 5.1 plus a bunch of other options.
What about the Waves 360° package? Depending on which forum you read, every sound engineer in the industry uses them and they make your song sound like a million bucks, or they are mediocre and nobody uses them.
Not knowing any sound engineers personally, it’s hard to tell.
This likely isn’t the advice you are looking for, and it is partially based on an assumption that you are moderately new to audio engineering - so take it with a grain of salt & adjust as necessary.
I think you’d be better off ignoring all the different varieties of Compressors, for example, which you could possibly be using, and instead focus on the ones you currently have at hand. The truth is the differences between plugs is often pretty subtle and maybe not even audible unless you are skilled at dialing it in. That’s how you end up with the same plug-in being both great and useless.
As an analogy, I can’t play violin. So if you had me try to play both a cheap student violin and a Stradivarius, the results would be similarly ugly for both attempts. And it would probably take many years of practice before anyone could hear the differences between the two.
The bottom line - the skills you develop are way more important than the tools you use.
Indeed, I’m very new at it, although I’ve been a videographer for 20 years, so that kind of gives me a foot in the door because I’ve had to work with sound for decades. Obviously not at this level, with many tracks with instruments, certainly not virtual ones.
But my philosophy when it comes to plugins is this. I’d rather find out the one plugin most of the industry uses for each specific task (for example, the best reverb, the best limiter, and so on), and focus on learn it well, rather than go through several reverbs to figure out that Cinematic Rooms is the best one for my needs (at least when it comes to accessible ones, because I would love to have the VSL Mir something that allows you to position instruments in a 3D space but it’s over 600 € so that’s out of my reach.
And I though I was pretty much setup in that respect, but then I found out that a lot of the plugins I have are only stereo. Sure, my bad for assuming they all were, but live and learn I guess.
At first glance that seems like a reasonable approach - except I don’t think anything even close to a consensus exists on the topic. It’s kind of like electric guitarists - if you gathered 10 of them together and asked about their favorite distortion pedal, you’d likely get 60 different pedal names.
Have you confirmed this by looking at them in the Channel Settings Routing tab?
When I finally got to my studio PC I loaded a bunch of plug-ins from different manufactures to take a look. All the Steinberg plug-ins I looked at support 5.1, but hardly anything else did. Some of that is because I’ve never shopped specifically for 5.1 tools.
So I asked the Copilot AI about it and below is the response. It tended to want to focus on tools for creating 5.1 over tools that process a 5.1 signal, so it took a few questions. Seems to give a sense of who’s playing in this space.
Which VST audio plugins support 5.1 sound?
There are several VST audio plugins that support 5.1 surround sound. Here are a few of them:
What about compressors, limiters, EQs and similar plugins that support 5.1?
Sure, there are several VST audio plugins that support 5.1 surround sound and offer functionalities like compression, limiting, and equalization. Here are a few:
Well, that information is a bit outdated, since RX is on version 11. But Ozone 11 was crucial for my workflow, until I found out that it only does stereo. What a waste. Same for the Fabfilter $400 Pro bundle I bought a few months ago. Why would a bundle have an EQ and a limiter that support 5.1 but the compressor and mastering plugin only support stereo? It doesn’t make sense to me. Had I known that, I would’ve spent that money in the Waves 360 suite.
Is there perhaps a way to route a 5.1 bus to 3 separate stereo buses that I can apply Ozone 11 to, then merge them back into a 5.1 for output? I know it’s a bit Frankensteinish, but Ozone 11 was the final touch for my mixes. It didn’t always get it right, but most times it did, after I tamed it down a bit.
Those are the main plugins I use for the surround channel/busses and of course the Cubase stock plugins are very handy.
In general I avoid using plugins on a 5.1 busses stage, I try to do the processing as much as possible on stereo/mono bus (for example: snares, kicks, guitars, basses, voice etc. ) and than the sonically ready sound goes to 5.1 bus for stage placement. On 5.1 bus I use only the Cubase bus EQ and on very rare cases I will use limiter or compressor.
For EQ, the Cubase Studio EQ works great. I use Brickwall Limiter as well, with a transparent stereo compressor or limiter or two ahead of that on the mains (typically UAD Precision Buss Compressor or Limiter).
When it comes to mastering the surround mix, I try to take care of any major issues/jobs (levels, dynamic EQ, etc.) ahead of time. Way too easy to butcher the surround mix if you have to do any major level changes or EQ surgery…
Thank you all for your advice. I’m tempted to buy the Waves 360 surround tools since it seems like a very decent package for $300, but I bought a lot of bundles like that that I ended up regretting because they were not as good as I thought. In fact, the $400 Fabfilter Pro package was a huge disappointment when I found out that some of its plugins are only stereo.
So I guess I’m going to do more digging on the Waves ones, give it a few weeks, then download the demos and see from there.
