Founded by an acclaimed DJ/EDM producer and the lead programmer of a top UK game development company, Nugen Audio is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. The company first launched with stereo-image-related plug-ins for music production. Today, the brand has expanded to include award-winning loudness metering/correction, surround sound, mixing/mastering, tracking and audio analysis tools that are used by some of the world’s top names in post-production, broadcast and music.
“I co-founded Nugen Audio in 2004 with the goal of changing the world of audio,” says Dr. Paul Tapper, Nugen Audio CEO. “I am thrilled to have created a brand that has not only become a ‘household’ name in our industry, but that has grown so impressively over the past 20 years. I look forward to what our team will accomplish in the next two decades.”
Tapper developed many of the original algorithms that form the basis of Nugen Audio’s products, including loudness metering and correction, DynApt, upmixing and True Peaklimiting. Tapper began his career as a lead programmer at Runecraft and worked as a lead programmer for Team 17 Digital from 2003-2010, while simultaneously creating tools for Nugen Audio. Today, in addition to his executive role with Nugen, Tapper also runs the new immersive gaming brand, Fruity Systems.
From the outset, Nugen Audio has been fully focused on providing solutions to real-life problems.
“The goal is always to enhance users’ lives—either by making existing challenges easier to overcome, such as with the VisLM loudness meter, which has become an industry standard, or by producing new and exciting possibilities to ignite the imagination, like upmixing to immersive audio with Halo Upmix or the ground-breaking new reverb technology in Paragon,” says Nugen Audio CTO Charles Blessing. “We continually endeavor to identify product categories that are either new or currently under-served, and then strive to create the most practically useful solutions in those categories to ensure our customers can run successful and effective businesses themselves.”
“Everything we do at Nugen Audio originates with our values,” says CMO Sophie Guest, who first joined the company in 2018. “We believe in making decisions based on what will give the greatest benefit over the long-term, on valuing people, and that quality is a higher priority than quantity.