VINAImono — Manual

01Overview

VINAImono is an intelligent mono / phase-recovery tool. A simple (L+R)/2 fold sounds fine until your left and right channels drift out of phase — then the summed signal cancels and the bottom drops out. The Phase Reconstruction Core measures phase conflict per frequency band and rebuilds the energy that plain summing throws away, so you get solid, translatable mono without the hollow.

The flagship NEXT GEN engine splits the signal at ~300 Hz and runs independent phase-conflict correlators on the bass and the mid/high bands. Where it detects cancellation it applies frequency-conscious gain compensation; coherent material passes untouched. A scrolling phase-correlation display and a MID/SIDE meter show you exactly what's happening, all at zero latency.

02The interface

• Phase-correlation display — a scrolling history running from +1 (in-phase) down to -1 (anti-phase), with a red wash as it nears cancellation and a smoothed numeric readout you can trust at a glance.
• MID/SIDE meter — a loudness meter that shows how much energy lives in the mid versus the sides, so you always know how wide the source really is.
• Compare Mode switch — flips between Original, Classic and Next Gen to A/B exactly what the smart engine is putting back.
• Knobs — Strength sets the wet/dry amount of the reconstruction; Mono Freq sets the line below which everything folds to mono.

03Knobs & buttons

04The three modes

05Under the hood

The NEXT GEN engine is a per-band correlation-driven reconstruction stage. Rather than collapsing the stereo field with a single sum, it isolates the bass from the mid/high, measures how coherent each band is over time, and applies only as much power compensation as the detected cancellation calls for — all of it sample-rate-invariant, all of it at zero latency.

Signal flow

• Band split — the L/R stereo signal is split into a low band and a high band at ~300 Hz using one-pole (first-order, 6 dB/oct) crossovers. The two complementary bands reconstruct back to the full-range signal, so the split is transparent when no correction is applied.
• Per-band correlation — each band runs its own independent sliding-window correlator that tracks the instantaneous L/R phase relationship. The windows are tuned to the content: the low band integrates over a long window (≈10 ms @ 48 kHz) to read sustained bass coherence, while the high band uses a short window (≈1.5 ms @ 48 kHz) so it reacts quickly to transient phase shifts.
• Frequency-conscious power compensation — when a correlator detects cancellation, the engine restores the lost energy with a band-specific make-up gain. The amount is scaled per band: up to +6 dB in the low band and up to +15.6 dB in the high band, reflecting how much more high-frequency energy a destructive sum can throw away.
• Tail-aware side-rescue lane — a dedicated side path recovers stereo information that would otherwise be lost into the sum, with tail-awareness so decays and reverb tails are preserved instead of being clamped to silence.
• SR-invariant smoothing — every detector window, gain trajectory and compensation curve is smoothed against a time constant rather than a fixed sample count, so the engine behaves identically at 44.1, 48, 96 kHz and beyond. No coefficient drift, no re-tuning per session sample rate.
• Coherent-input guarantee — for a perfectly coherent input (L = R), the math collapses to exactly (L+R)/2: no compensation engages, no coloration is introduced. The engine only ever acts on material that is actually cancelling.
• Latency — the entire chain is feed-forward with no look-ahead buffer, so reported and actual latency are both zero samples. It can sit on the master while you track without any delay-compensation penalty.
• Metering internals — the phase-correlation history is computed from the same broadband L/R relationship and smoothed before display for a stable, trustworthy readout; the MID/SIDE meter derives its mid and side levels from the standard M = (L+R)/√2, S = (L−R)/√2 decomposition.

06Measured

Measured in-house (headless host + numpy/scipy), 48 kHz.

07Specifications