Doug Mountain Restores Hollywood History In Dolby Atmos Using Nugen Audio Plug-Ins

With a career spanning over four decades, veteran re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor Doug Mountain has built a career out of elevating sound in film and television — and most recently, reviving the classics. He has worked on series including Community, The Walking Dead and All American, and served as a consulting engineer for the Grammy Awards for over 25 years. Today, he is widely known as what he jokingly calls “the Atmos Remix King,” with nearly 40 feature film remixes under his belt.

Most recently working from his custom Dolby Atmos mix room, Mountain has become a key figure in remixing many studios’ historic film libraries for immersive sound formats, including Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. At the heart of his workflow is a selection of Nugen Audio plug-ins, including Halo Upmix, which he credits as essential to faithfully modernizing the beloved films. “Halo Upmix is the cornerstone of what I do,” he says “It’s instrumental, especially for music upmixing and backgrounds. It provides a fuller, smoother sounding upmix compared to a lot of other similar tools out there.”

Mountain often works with limited source material, such as mono dialogue, isolated music and effects stems or legacy 5.1 mixes. His goal is to breathe new life into these elements without compromising their historical integrity. “A lot of mixes from the ‘90s have strong front and rear elements, but we’re missing the middle of the room,” he says. “Halo Upmix helps fill that space and makes the soundstage feel complete. It tells me what’s missing and helps build it up naturally.”

Mountain’s past projects, including Twister, Enter the Dragon and High Society, have all benefitted from this meticulous remixing process. A more recent highlight is the re-release of Purple Rain, which was screened in Dolby Atmos for one night only at select AMC theaters across the U.S. For Mountain, the emotional experience of that film was paramount, which is where Halo Upmix shined. “When you wrap the music around the audience using Halo Upmix, you intensify the emotional experience,” he explains. “It doesn’t just come from all speakers — it envelops you in a way that feels natural and powerful.”

The project was more than just an enhancement. Mountain and his team had to follow strict guidelines to ensure they remained faithful to the original audio experience. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel or become a revisionist,” he says. “Our job is to restore the soundtrack to how people remember it, which is often better than it originally was.” To achieve detailed analysis and ensure compliance, Mountain relied on Nugen’s Halo Vision and LM-Correct plug-ins.

“These tools are indispensable when repurposing content for different platforms,” Mountain says. “Once we clean up and rework the audio, each market has different loudness specs, and Nugen helps us meet those standards without compromising quality. The plug-ins are intuitive and stable, and they sound great and work across formats. You can even fold a mix down to stereo without phasing issues, which is huge.”

Mountain’s enthusiasm for Nugen goes beyond the plug-ins themselves. “The solutions are easy to access and install, but the company is also super approachable, which I appreciate,” he notes.

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