Steinberg.Hypersonic.v2 Win 7 32 Bits 64 Bits
Bernd Manison
Most software instruments usually dedicate themselves to offering one particular method of creating sound, so you might have a synth, a drum player, a sampler, and so on, all running as separate VST Instruments. This leads to a situation where you need to have a handful of different instruments loaded in order to put some ideas into your sequencer, which isn't necessarily a bad thing; but this practice forces you to create a set of templates that preload certain instruments when you need to start writing.
While there are obviously dedicated instruments (synths, drum machines, and so on) in the world of hardware instruments, there's also a breed of device known as the workstation, which bundles samples, synthesis and effects into one easy-to-use and immediate system. Korg popularised this concept with the famous M1 and are still the market leaders with their Triton range of instruments, although modules like Roland's JV/XV series, and Yamaha's TG/XG series also took the studio by storm when they were released during the '90s. So much so, in fact, that I'm willing to guess that 90 percent of the people reading this article will own or have owned one of the aforementioned devices.
In terms of the sound library, Hypersonic is supplied with a 1000-preset patch library that cover a huge range of instrument types. And although Hypersonic does play back sample-based material, this is just one element of a patch's sound, as Hypersonic also contains a virtual-analogue synth engine (featuring two oscillators with multiple waveforms, pulse-width modulation and sync capabilities), a three-operator FM engine (one carrier and two modulators in parallel), and a wavetable synth engine. And, of course, no workstation would be complete without a healthy selection of effects: Hypersonic allows up to 64 effects to be used simultaneously, four for each individual Part.
As you'll come to realise, Hypersonic is incredibly modest when it comes to using your computer's resources and, as such, Steinberg advise Windows users to have at least a 500MHz Pentium III- or Athlon-based machine (although a 1GHz processor is recommended), and Mac users to have at least a 500MHz G3 or, preferably, a G4. You'll need 256MB of RAM to run Hypersonic and 300MB of free hard disk space. If you're thinking that these requirements seem a little low when compared to similar products, take a look at the 'First Compressions' box later in this article for more information, as this situation is not all it seems.
Hypersonic is the first VST Instrument from Steinberg that requires a hardware copy-protection device (often affectionately referred to as a dongle) to be attached to your USB port in order to run. Cubase and Nuendo users will already be familiar with the type of dongle that's supplied with Hypersonic, and the good news is that it's possible to transfer the licence from a Hypersonic dongle to your Cubase or Nuendo dongle, saving you from having to have two dongles plugged into your computer. The bad news is that I've heard of some users having problems with the drivers required for Hypersonic's copy protection, where you might need to reinstall your sequencer or contact Steinberg for a new code when there's an error transferring licences.
However, I didn't personally experience any copy-protection issues during my time with Hypersonic, so I have no complaints. And, in fact, this hardware method is in some ways preferable to Xphraze's CD-ROM-based protection, which actually prevented me from installing the product on my IBM T40 laptop.
The list of patches in Hypersonic is shown in the default Load page selected in the Display area as a tree-view-styled list where the patches are organised into folders based on the general family of sounds to which they belong, such as acoustic pianos, drums, and so on. Loading a patch is simple: double-click on the appropriate patch and it will be loaded into the currently selected slot in the Part area, where there are 16 slots in total to represent 16 MIDI Channels. One thing I noticed here is that, initially, it's easy to double-click a patch while forgetting to select a different Slot, losing whatever instrument was previously loaded into that slot in the process. A quick 'load last instrument' key would have been neat, but this is a minor quibble.
Each Slot in the Part list has a corresponding Mute, Link and Level control, and the first and last of these are fairly self-explanatory. The Mute button mutes the corresponding Part in Hypersonic, working independently of any Channel/Track mutes in the host, and also doubles as a MIDI Indicator when a Part is in normal playback mode. The Level control adjusts the volume of a given Part, and this also responds to Controller 7 (volume) Change data, such as that generated by a MIDI volume fader in Cubase's Inspector.
Once you start getting into Link mode, you'll be able to get more out of this feature by exploring Hypersonic's MIDI settings page, which allows you to set key and velocity ranges for a Part, along with a semitone-transpose setting, and a tuning option in cents. Using these settings in combination with Link mode allows you to create more interesting combinations by transposing or detuning layers against each other, or creating keyboard splits in terms of pitch and velocity. The MIDI settings page also enables you to set the maximum number of voices for a Part (between one and 64), and there's a parameter Lock so that the settings on this page aren't reset when you load a new Patch into a 'locked' slot.
Getting back to the main interface, the Level control, as mentioned earlier, allows you to adjust the volume of a given Part, and also includes an indicator that highlights the current setting of a Level control. However, by right-clicking on the Level label at the top of the level control strip, you can set the indicators to one of three other modes besides Fader Value: Velocity, Polyphony, and Audio Level. These three modes turn the indicators into animated VU-style meters that illustrate either the velocities of incoming notes on a given Channel, the polyphony usage of a Part, based on the maximum number of voices set for that Part, or the audio output level of a Part. These modes don't offer any numerical values to make them indispensable, but they can still be quite helpful.
As an example of Hypersonic's efficiency, one Project using a fully loaded instance of Hypersonic set to 'XXL', playing back around 20 MIDI tracks, with 22 effects enabled, used between 30 and 40 percent of my 1.3GHz Pentium-M's processing power (see above). And in terms of memory usage, the 16 loaded Patches for this instance of Hypersonic used up just 34.2MB for all manner of synths, basses, drums and other instruments. One word comes to mind: impressive.
However, the big advantage in searching for patches using Hypersonic's interface is that the search facility doesn't just take the patch names into account: every patch also contains a number of keywords to describe the character and tone of a sound, which are also searched when you're trying to find an appropriate patch. For example, you could type in 'nasty synth' to find a suitably nasty synth sound, and right-clicking on the search field before entering any text reveals the base keywords in a pop-up menu that you can use in your search string. This is a great example of how computer-based interfaces can really make an instrument better, and I think this is often an area where Wizoo score over their competition. Spectrasonics' Atmosphere might be a great-sounding instrument, for example, but how quick is it to navigate through the list of available patches?
To find out more about this, I asked Hypersonic programmer Paul Kellett to explain how and why Hypersonic's sample library was kept so lean. "All the sample data is compressed on disk and in memory, so it doesn't take up much RAM and the patches are quick to load. In order to keep the memory usage to a minimum, no sample data gets loaded more than once if it doesn't need to be. So you can load up various pianos, and if they use the same piano sample, it's only in memory once.
"I'd looked before at what Gigasampler was doing in terms of compression, and they've got a 2:1 compression algorithm. It was quite easy to figure out what it was doing, so I did something similar." However, the big difference between the way Gigasampler can compress sound and the way Hypersonic's sample data is compressed is that Wizoo opted to use a lossy form of compression, whereas the method employed by Gigasampler is lossless. "I decided to make ours slightly lossy, but in listening tests in a decent studio we couldn't tell any difference between the slight loss in some of the samples and no loss, so I don't think anyone will notice the difference."
So to what extent were Wizoo able to compress the sample data for Hypersonic? "It's down to around eight bits per sample, so if it was 16-bit, it's half the size, and if was 24-bit, it's a third of the size."
Another great feature designed to make playing with Hypersonic easy is the set of six Hyper Knobs, located just above the on-screen keyboard at the bottom of the window. Every patch contains six pre-programmed parameter controls that assign the six most significant sound-shaping parameters in a patch to the Hyper Knobs, providing the user with immediate access to the most important performance parameters in a patch without having to delve into the Edit page. The Hyper Knobs are labelled appropriately on Hypersonic's interface for the patch loaded in the currently selected Slot, and are easily adjusted by using the mouse.
The other Edit pages available for a Patch are represented by a series of boxes that run vertically along the left side of the Edit page, representing a top-down structure for the signal flow. Each synthesis or sample element in a patch has its own Edit page where you can adjust filter and amplifier envelope settings, for example, and any of the settings for Patch effects are also duplicated on the effects element pages (marked 'FX') within this overall patch-editing structure.
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