Neyrinck Mix 51

Mix 51 is made up of two main components. First, there are Mono and Stereo Panner plugins that can be placed on track inserts to pan, mix and route audio to the Mix 51 Surround Mixer buses. Second, the Mix 51 Surround Mixer plugin provides 30 channels of outputs, grouped as three 5.1 main buses and three quad auxiliary buses. The idea is that the additional 5.1 buses can be used as subgroups to manage, say, dialogue, music and sound effects, while the quad buses are designed to handle quad reverb sends, as LE doesn't support surroundformat sends.

Surround Mixer is an RTAS plugin which can be placed on any mono or stereo track. A single instance of this plugin manages all Mix 51 surround inputs and outputs in a Pro Tools Session, so it is not necessary to have more than one Surround Mixer in any one Session. Because its inputs come from Surround Panner plugins and its outputs appear as Pro Tools track inputs, it is not critical where you place the Surround Mixer plugin, as it does not process any audio on the track where it is located. The audio is simply passed through from input to output. The mixer is fairly selfexplanatory, and gives you metering plus volume, solo and mute controls for each of the three 5.1 mix buses and quad auxiliary buses.

The next step is to create enough Aux tracks in your Pro Tools Session to return the individual outputs from the Surround Mixer plugin and route them to the interface outputs. You will need three stereo Aux tracks for each plugin 5.1 buss you want to use, and a further two stereo Aux tracks per send bus. You can then insert your preferred stereo reverb plugin in both channels to create a pseudosurround reverb. Once all these Aux tracks have been set up, route their outputs to the appropriate interface outputs as set from your I/O Setup window.

The layout and operation of the Mix 51 Surround Panner is very similar to that of the Digidesign Surround Panner. The basic panning tool is a conventional twodimensional panner of the kind that is often called an X/Y panner. You can either click on the orange '+' control and drag it around to perform panning moves, or use the sliders on the bottom and side of the panning grid to position the output of that track in your 5.1 surround sound stage. Separate controls set how much of the output of the panner will be routed to the Centre and LFE channels.

A hurdle with the whole Mix 51 system is that all plugins in the Pro Tools mixer are inserted before the track fader, with the exception of Master Fader tracks, so the track fader potentially becomes redundant in the surround mix. There are two ways of dealing with this. One is to use the fader in the plugin instead; the down side of this is that you don't see the mixer's fader move as you would normally. The other is to route each track to an Aux track, and insert the Panner plugins on these Auxes rather than on the source tracks. This, of course, means adding yet more channels to your mixer, and you end up with the fader and the plugin on separate tracks. We cannot blame Neyrinck for this limitation, as it is inherent in the design of the Pro Tools mixer, but it does make for a messy solution in this particular application.

Paul Neyrinck should be commended for producing an excellent 'out of the box' implementation of surround mixing in LE and MPowered systems. Mix 51 is a very workable solution that enables LE users to create and mix surround content. The idea of bypassing the conventional Pro Tools mixer routing does take a little getting used to, but the fact that multiple surround and send buses are built into the Mix 51 structure makes surround bussing and mixing on LE systems as easy as possible. There is an excellent demo session included in the installation, which demonstrates how to use Mix 51 and is well worth going through before you start using it in anger. My only disappointment in the design is the implementation of the stereo panner, where a singlesteering option would make all the difference.  0