Quality and Variety
If the working environment does not allow you to quickly capture your ideas, many a creative spark is stifled before it can ignite. With Hypersonic 2 at your disposal, you don’t have to first flip through countless sample CDs or juggle a synthesizer’s sound design tools to find the right sound. Just like a big hardware workstation, Hypersonic 2 boasts a vast sound library that lets you instantly capture song ideas in any musical style. More than 1,800 factory presets cover an tremendous range of modern and classic sounds. Pianos and keyboards, strings and horns, drums and percussion, guitars and basses, pads and choruses, drum loops, sound FX – all this and whole lot more is on board. Hypersonic 2 combines Steinberg's most advanced synthesizer technology with premium sample content to put this exceptional sonic variety at your fingertips. Four extraordinary sound engines - Sample Player, Virtual Analog, FM and Wavetable - complement the 1.7-GB sound library.
Sound Management
When engaged in intense music production sessions, few tasks are more annoying and time-killing than searching for the right sound. This is why Hypersonic 2’s Patch Browser comes complete with an efficient, integrated search engine. Patches are arranged sensibly in convenient banks, and labeled with category names and sound descriptions. You can search the sound library using instrument names (say, piano) as well as associative terms such as warm or metallic. And that’s a great help in finding the right sound, right away.
Performance
Hypersonic 2 was programmed to use resources sparingly – that is, with utmost economy. The peerless Playback Engine is a loss-free sound generator engineered to deliver outstanding VST instrument performance. Up to 1,024 voices and 32 individual outs are available per instance - at very low CPU loads, using very little RAM space, at very fast load-times.
Hyperknobs
Working with a synthesizer almost always entails some post editing to tailor sounds to a perfect fit for the song. Hypersonic 2 offers easily handled sound editing functions that quickly yield the right results and therefore do not unnecessarily impede the creative musical process.
A seasoned professional sound designer was tasked to brainstorm every patch and pinpoint the six properties of greatest relevance to it; that is, the attributes that shape its sound. These were then assigned to six rotary pots called Hyperknobs. Each of these knobs affects several parameters simultaneously, editing each in a way that best suits the given sonic context. Every Hyperknob has a musically meaningful name. You can assign functions to Hyperknobs and devise routings on the Edit page. In Version 2 and later, Hyperknobs are equipped with a MIDI Learn function so that they can be readily remote-controlled using the knobs on connected MIDI hardware.
Effects
Hypersonic 2 offers a huge arsenal of high-quality effects, and a very flexible effects handling concept to boot. Four dedicated effect sends are available for every patch; they may be routed freely to any output. In addition, you can define four global send effects. Effects that are inseparable from a sound - for instance, the distortion module for a saturated guitar - are integrated directly into the patch as insert effects. A patch may contain up to 15 freely definable insert effects, whereby their sequence may be modified at will.