leapwing audio stageone 2
Level up your control of the stereo field with this powerful and transparent-sounding width and depth plugin. Rex Johnson leaps in…
When Leapwing Audio’s StageOne stereo processor was launched back in 2019, it was praised for its high-quality algorithms, but some found the interface a little lacking.
Now with the version 2 release, it sports multiband processing, new features and a snazzy stereo visualiser that greatly improves the plugin workflow.
Leapwing Audio’s plugins might not be the cheapest, but they’re known for their highquality and transparent-sounding algorithms. As such, StageOne is often cited on forums as being one of the best-sounding options for clean width enhancement that can even be used when mastering. The plugin consists of five algorithms for controlling the soundstage, including Width,
Depth, Mono Spread and Centre Gravity from the first version, plus the new Phase Recovery function. Leapwing has also apparently finetuned and improved some of these for this version. Where Mono Spread can add width to a mono signal by stretching out the centre channel, the Width control can widen or narrow the side information without affecting the phantom centre. Both are mono compatible, so you don’t have to worry about getting any nasty surprises, although you might get some subtle differences and pre-ringing artefacts if you start to use both at more extreme settings.
Although you have more controls, it all feels a little bit more intuitive thanks to the excellent new visualiser
Add depth
Centre Gravity is fairly easy to understand as it just steers the signal more to the left or right. Perhaps a little more ambiguous is the Depth control, which adds in ‘directionally optimized’ reflections to enhance the sense of depth in the sound field. Essentially, it can help you place elements more forwards or backwards in the mix and give them more of a larger-sounding sense of 3D space.
Finally, we have the new Phase Recovery algorithm, which has a simple on/off control for each band. This identifies out-of-phase components and then attempts to realign them to avoid losing information when summed to mono. In practice, it’s fairly effective at subtly tightening up things like overly-wide synth patches, but much more impressive when used to treat problem recordings and dramatically out-of-phase material. We were able to take an old string sample that nearly cancelled out in mono, and make it much fuller-sounding and more usable. It won’t work on everything, but it’s definitely a welcome tool to add to StageOne’s already useful arsenal.
