Jun30Written by:Joel Braverman
Tuesday, June 30, 1998 6:00 PM 
After reading the marketing hype on Arboretum's web site for their plugin effects package, I was almost drooling at the idea of testing them out. Are they worth it? At $299, they are certainly less expensive than some competing effects packages.
One of the nice things about Hyperprism is the logical set of tools that it provides - almost 30 different plugins - if your software will allow you to chain direct-x plug-in effects, you can take, for instance, the noise gate plugin and gate a reverb, a classic effect made famous by Phil Collins and others. I was able to get quite a few chained up on a mono track in Cakewalk. Of course, the Vocoder is what I was dying to hear, but due to some technical difficulties, I got much less use out of it than I did their HyperVerb(TM), which is Arboretum's Flagship product.
All of the Hyperprism effects sport a similar user interface - a set of sliders and buttons at the top, ouput level controls on the left, and a real-time controller, the X and Y axis of which can be assigned to any of the sliders. You can actually set the range that the sliders operate on by typing numbers into the boxes to the left and rigtht of the sliders.
A representative set of presets is available for most of the effects, and you can create your own presets as well. The HyperVerb(TM) is definitely the best sounding effect of the bunch. It sounds pristine and beautiful, with no "repeating" or beating artifacts that some other reverbs have. The other reverbs in the pack didn't quite grab my ears as much as this one did, but they were still useful.
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The main problems that I had with Hyperprism-DX were the GPF's that I would get from some of the effects, in different programs. I'm still running cakewalk 6.01, and the first effect I tried out (couldn't resist) was the Sonic Decimator, which is a bit-rate/depth reduction device, to add grit, aliasing and distortion to your pristine sounding recordings. Useful for Grunge, techno, rap, anything where you DON'T want it to sound pretty.
It was indeed decimating. As soon as I opened up the Sonic Decimator, it GPF'ed, taking Cakewalk, and any other audio software I tried to open up afterwards with it. Only after rebooting, was I able to open the Decimator in Samplitude 2496 and Cakewalk and experiment with it. This is one effect that I suggest you turn down the volume when you play with it, to avoid ruining your speakers and your ears. It can produce some seriously nasty sounds.
I had the most trouble with the Vocoder plugin - Samplitude has a real-time mode that allows you to pump live inputs through the effects. I was not able to do this with the Vocoder - it would crash everytime I opened it. I was able to test it in non-realtime fashion, applying the effect to a stereo waveform. It also crashed several times in Cakewalk, but it is intended to be used on a stereo file, and Cake 6.01 architecture doesn't appear to support this correctly.
I put a call in to Arboretum as I was rather disappointed, and was informed that "it works fine in Sound Forge". I loaded up the Sound Forge demo that was included on the Hyperprism CD, and yes, it does work fine in Sound Forge. I forwarded some of the debug info from the GPF's to Todd at Arboretum, and was rewarded with a positive response - they had found some bugs, and were now hard at work cranking out fixes for them which they expected to complete in a day or two. Unfortunately, they were not ready at the time of this writing.
Most of the other plugins worked fine. Some are:
Frequency Shifter
Great for making things sound weird - its similar to a ring modulator, but it does stranger things to the spectrum of the sound - making my acoustic guitar sound kind of like a banjo, or a harpsichord or a dying alien with a plastic tube in its mouth. Controls include mod frequency, LFO speed and depth, and feedback.
Ring Modulator
Produces metallic effects by modulating your source with a carrier. Use in a chain with the Frequency shifter for really weird sounds.
Pitch Changer
Not a Digitech quality pitch shifter, but you can get some interesting and usefuleffects.
Quasi-Stereo
A stereo widener - lets you play around with the stereo image.
Multi-Delay
An interesting multi-tap delay - the first two echoes are user defined, and the third is "the sum of delays 1 and 2" according to the help file.
With over 30 effects, including a compressor, Hyperprism is an almost-complete effects processing system. The HyperVerb(TM) is a really killer reverb sound, that performs as advertised, living up to the juicy PR on Arboretum's web site.
By using the various effects in combination, (like putting a compressor after the Sonic Decimator) it could be considered a replacement for an outboard effects box, and is capable of much longer effects chains than you would find on your average off the shelf reverb box - on a pentium II 300 I was able to process 8 different effects in a chain (on a mono track) simultaneously. On another test, I got 6 Hyperverbs to play on 6 tracks with two more tracks running un-effected.
Hyperprism needs a little work to perform stably with other popular software besides Sound Forge, although, after the initial crashes, it worked most of the time with Cakewalk. I swear, I didn't change a thing on my system. With Samplitude 2496, it was a little more crash prone, but I found out that there are some problems with Samplitudes's DirectX implementation that will probably be corrected in a maintainance release.
Overall, Hyperprism is a very good deal for the dough, and with a little more work from the developers, could turn out to be an excellent investment in some basic tools - and a few fancy ones - to help add color to your sound.
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