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Kelly Industries Bass Manager - Surround Sound VST Plug-In

Kelly Industries Bass Manager is a surround sound vst plug-in designed for use in Cubase and Nuendo. It simulates the bass management systems found on most dolby digital and dts surround sound receivers. This allows surround sound engineers to hear what their 5.1 surround mix sounds like without having to burn a CDr or DVDr and then play it through a consumer 5.1 surround receiver.

This plug-in is to be used as a Master Plug-in. This plug-in is to be used for monitoring only. This means you turn off the plug-in when you render your main audio files.

To use the Bass Manager plug-in you’ll need be using a speaker format that has an LFE channel. In Cubase you can use LRC+LFE, LRS+LFE, and 5.1 formats. The x.0 speaker fomats don’t have a subwoofer (.0). After selecting your speaker format then insert the Bass Manager plug-in into the Master Output. The default setting should work for almost all situations.

If you are wanting to monitor in Stereo then select the either the LRC+LFE or the LRS+LFE format. For Stereo be sure to press the the “STEREO SUB” button as this will make sure that the main subwoofer output signal is at the correct level.

The “X-Over Freq” knob is used to match your monitors to your subwoofer. For instance if your studio monitors only go down to 50 Hz or so (-3dB point) then turn the knob to 50 Hz. You should be able to find the frequency response of your monitors by looking in the documentation that came with them or by contacting the manufacturer.

You should now be able to use the plug-in. Please be careful with the volume settings until you are sure they are correct. Keep the volume low and then start Nuendo/Cubase and slowly bring up the main volume.

Kelly Industries Bass Manager Download:

Kelly Industries Bass Manager - Free VST (0.10Mb)

What Is Bass Management?
Most of the consumer Dolby Digital decoders found in homes today do in fact have bass management. It is built in and is somewhat transparent to the user. Bass Management allows the bass from the Left, Center, Right, Left Surround and Right Surround speakers to be summed together then output to a subwoofer. It also adds to this summed subwoofer output the LFE (Low Frequency Effect) channel. This helps to decrease distortion by redirecting the low frequencies (80Hz and below) to the subwoofer. There are some systems that don’t remove the low end frequencies before sending them to the main speakers.

If you are mixing in the 5.1 surround sound format then you need to have some sort of bass management system in place. This really becomes apparent when you are monitoring your 5.1 mix. Using a Bass Management system will insure that you are monitoring a somewhat close approximation of what the consumer level decoders are hearing, or your listeners. Also the room size and acoustics come in to play, but more that later. So as you can see Bass Management is a little more complicated than you would expect. It’s pretty simple once you understand the basics.

The Kelly Industries Bass Manageris a simple Bass Management plug-in that works with Cubase and Nuendo. This plug-in is freeware. This page will grow with more info on Bass Management, Bass Redirection, and LFE Management so stay tuned!

Kelly Industries Bass Manager Screenshot

Kelly Industries Bass Manager Diagram

Bass Manager Tip: You can however use the Bass Manager to create an LFE channel. It may be necessary sometimes to generate an LFE channel from the 5 main channels (L, C, R, Ls, and Rs). For instance some DVD-Audio decoders don’t have any bass management built into there decoders. So if you don’t have anything in the LFE channel then you may not hear any low frequencies coming out of the subwoofer.

The process is simple to do with the Bass Manager Plugin:

Turn OFF the SUM High Pass Filter
Turn ON the SUM LP filter (Low Pass)
Turn OFF the SUM Invert
Turn ON the LFE LP (You can also keep this OFF as well)
Turn OFF the LFE Invert
Turn OFF the LFE +10dB Gain
Turn OFF the LFE Invert
Turn OFF the LCR Stereo LFE boost
Bring the LFE gain down somewhere between -15 and -20 dB
Set the LFE CrossOver to 80Hz
Build you mix as you normally would

This will put the summation of the 5 main channels into the LFE channel and then apply a low pass filter at 80Hz to it (if you have LFE LP turned ON). The level will be -15 to -20 dB down from the other channels. This is mainly so there will be something coming out of the LFE channel if the DVD-Audio player doesn’t have bass management.

We wouldn’t recommend creating your own LFE channel for production releases though. The main problem with this is that on DVD-Audio players that have bass management you may create more problems. For instance the difference between the LFE channel you created and the LFE channeld generated by the DVD-Audio player will more than likely be out of phase and sound horrible.

Kelly Industries Bass Manager Download:

Kelly Industries Bass Manager - Free VST (0.10Mb)

More information on Bass Management: TMH Bass Manager - the industry leader for bass management. There are also others from Martin Sound, Studio Technologies, and SPL

More info: http://www.kellyindustries.com