That ‘Z100’ Chief Engineer, And Omnia Founder, Creates an Upmixer

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You may have heard of Frank Foti, even if you’re wholly unfamiliar with engineering, audio technology, or the radio business altogether.


Foti is featured in a recently produced documentary about the “Worst to First” rise 39 years ago of WHTZ, “Z100,” in New York. Why? Foti was the Chief Engineer, and was responsible for giving Z100 a distinctive audio processing formula that made the station stand out and become instantly recognizable, simply based on the radio playing the FM facility.

Fast-forward to 2022, and Foti, the founder of Omnia, is celebrating through a new audio venture the launch of an upmixer, a device specifically created to take Stereo music and transform it into Surround Sound-quality audio.

 

Syndicate of Sounds, newly created by Foti, who also serves as Executive Chairman of Cleveland-based Telos Alliance, has brought to market the Déjà Vu Upmixer.

Foti says it was created specifically to transform two-channel audio mixes into enveloping and exciting surround sound experiences.

“There is plenty of content available in surround sound,” he shares. “However, since the demise of physical media like SACD and DVD-Audio, 5.1 content for music is hard to find, with the majority of music recordings only available in stereo, leaving music fans in the dust, until now.”

Déjà Vu converts a stereo audio track into a surround audio track using a linear process that preserves natural sonic integrity, frequency response, and audio level, while faithfully supporting the music’s original production characteristics. “Unlike other upmixing methods, Déjà Vu does not rely on perceptual tricks like synthesized channel steering, phase modification, reverb, dynamic level adjustment, or time delay as mechanisms to create surround, thus avoiding resultant artifacts, inconsistent surround representation, and degradation of the overall audio performance,” Foti adds. “In fact, Déjà Vu-processed content sounds like it was originally mixed in 5.1 thanks to artifact-free processing, moving stereo mixes into the immersive era.”

He continues, “After years of research, development, and critical listening, I was able to create a faithful representation of immersive/surround audio from a two-channel or stereo audio track. Listening to material though this upmixer unmasks elements of the recording that could not be heard before…it’s like hearing your music for the first time and falling in love with it all over again. That’s why we call it Déjà Vu.”

Gary Katz, a producer for 1970s era musical act Steely Dan, is a fan.

“When Frank played music that we produced after upmixing it using Déjà Vu, I was fascinated,” Katz says. “Hearing it in surround sound and listening to this content in a new way was fabulous.”


 Contact Mary Ann Seidler to learn more about the product.