Review: EXPOSE 2 from Mastering the Mix (2024)

Gone are the days when you had to guess if your tracks are up to the standards of commercial releases. Today there are quite a few tools on the market to tell you just how much your mixes suck.

EXPOSE isn’t a new plugin. The previous instalment was a great tool but now, there’s a new version that aims to be more descriptive and hurtful than the previous one.

EXPOSE 2 is an audio quality control application that helps you identify and resolve issues with your music. So many tracks get distributed with technical errors such as poor EQ balance, clipping, over-compression, phase issues, and more. With EXPOSE 2, you can deliver the best listening experience and release your music with confidence.

Mastering the Mix

Simple Yet Slicker

The previous iteration of EXPOSE had a small, sleek interface with a very direct and functional outlook. You could drag and drop a track (or search using the browser) into the application window and it displayed the waveform with all the issue areas highlighted in red while the areas that are fine in blue. It featured 4 icons, each displaying the readouts for Loudness, Peak, Stereo/Phase heat map and Dynamic range/Loudness Range.

The new version adds more features to this. Now there is a new section at the bottom that contains the “Compare EQ”. There is a small list view on the side that shows you your tracks as well as any reference track that you wish to load. There is a tiny button alongside each of the titles that let you hide individual track’s EQ profiles in the section on the right.

The right side displays the EQ profiles for each of your tracks. The reference line is set by the EQ preset that you can choose from the dropdown preset menu. The EQ also features MID, SIDE and STEREO buttons to show specific curves for each track.

You can choose from one of many standards including Spotify, Apple Music, CD etc from the menu at the top centre. And each of these standard’s values can be tweaked via a small settings button located on the top right corner of the screen.

WebMD for your tracks

This is how it works – you load a track or multiple tracks into the software and it takes a few seconds to analyse. Once complete, if your track has no issues and meets all the requirements of the delivery standards that you have chosen, everything is blue and you are none the wiser. However, as it is for most of us, all the problem areas are highlighted in red. If you are someone with a fragile ego, I would not recommend throwing in older work that you might not be sure of, as seeing your entire track light up in red is quite a humbling experience.

So what does it show you? It displays 4 parameters mainly. The first one is the LUFS. There are two readouts in this square display. One that shows you the integrated value and the other readout right below the first one shows the short term values. The next parameter is the decibel true peak. This is quite self-explanatory and reads the peak values for the given track. The next one is the stereo heat map. This is basically a readout that shows you if your track is balanced energy-wise between the left and right channels. For example, if you have a heavy rock track with double-tracked guitars, you might have one side that’s a bit chug heavy and the other side a little lean. This can result in a lopsided mix. This is a tool that helps you fix such issues.

In addition to the stereo check, you have what is essentially a phase correlation meter that can show you sections of the track where you might have elements or sections where stuff is out of phase. This greatly helps with mono compatibility checks. The last readout is the dynamics section. It shows both the dynamic range in decibels as well as the loudness range in LUFS.

The bottom EQ section shows you the EQ curves concerning the control line in the middle. The control line can be set from the preset or you can compare the frequency response of your track in response to other tracks. This can be quite useful if you are mastering an album or EP to visually check if they all have similar frequency curves. There are many presets for each genre that sets the control line based on ideal curves for each. You can move the cursor along the EQ line to see the exact frequency and gain numbers for each point.

The Numbers Game

While everything about the readouts is fairly standard and expected, the most useful feature of theEXPOSE is the notes section for each track. There is a tiny button next to all the readouts that open a small description for each of the 4 sections. The description lets you know what is wrong with each parameter and what you can do to fix it. It’s basically WebMD for your mix!

For example, the loudness section can tell you how much to adjust your limiter settings and input setting by to achieve the ideal standards and similarly for the peak reading sections. The stereo section tells you why you should change things in your mix to ensure there are no fold-down loss issues upon delivery. The Dynamics section looks at whether the different sections of the tracks have a decent degree of variation in terms of dynamics and lets you know if it’s too compressed or squished.

The fact thatEXPOSE gives you a detailed explanation for each of the parameters is exactly what makes it so useful. In the past, such readouts were just numbers with very little context. You had to go back and adjust settings like limiter settings largely via guesswork. Post some guesstimating, you would export and throw it back intoEXPOSE only to find out that you may have under or overdone whatever you need to do. It quickly turns into a process that can become considerably tedious and annoying.

Find out more about EXPOSE 2