Space Designers? Fiedler Audio's new Stage?

I loved the discovery of UAD’s HW emulations (thank you Danny!) and I don’t think I need a huge arsenal of plugins. Hence I tend to ignore all the latest and supposedly greatest plugins that come out.

Today I came across Fiedler Audio’s new “Stage”, a toolkit that lets you easily shape the stereo image. It spans from Haas effect, over phase inversion and M/S signal processing to a number of proprietary algorithms. The demo is impressive. At my current stage on the learning curve (a lot of Next Level Mixing ahead of me) and some great tools at hand (Valhalla, iZotope Imager, etc.), however, it feels a bit like cheating, and using something like Stage a “quick-fix”.

So, my question to you more experienced mixers (or further ahead in the program), do you use “Space Designers”? How and where?

Great find @Marius. It’s like all these things, I am sure we already have tools from the MMWA recommended list that collectively can do what this does. However, it is about using the best tool for the job and sometimes that means the one that gets you the result quickest, without compromising sonic quality.

I am going to try this. I want productions that have space and width. I think this might help to save me time in doing so.

Been demoing this on a film mix. AMAZING for post production. I used it with Waves Doppler for a foley scene where the actress runs toward the camera and over to the right. Playing with the proximity and delay along with doppler got me some ridiculously believable results…

Tried it on a few music tracks as well, really like it. Helps you think of panning from a different perspective and has some cool psychoacoustics that make for really nice spatial imaging. Also does REALLY crazy modulation as well.