Kilohearts Ultimate v2.4.6 [WiN-MAC]

• Product: Kilohearts Ultimate
• Publisher: Kilohearts
• Version: 2.4.6
• Format: AAX, AU, VST3, VST
• Source: kilohearts.com/products/kilohearts_ultimate

Kilohearts Ultimate bundles ten Kilohearts products: three snapin hosts — Phase Plant, a semi-modular synth; Multipass, a multiband host splitting signal into up to five frequency ranges; and Snap Heap, up to seven serial or parallel effect chains — plus seven effect snapins including Disperser’s all-pass phase filter and Faturator’s dynamics-preserving distortion. Every snapin runs inside any of the three hosts, and a saved preset stays functional for anyone who opens it, regardless of which snapins they own. It answers the search for owning the whole Kilohearts catalog in one purchase.

Key Takeaway

Activates when a producer wants Phase Plant, Multipass, Snap Heap, and every current Premium Effect in one purchase rather than buying each separately. It displaces piecing the catalog together snapin by snapin, not a single competing plugin. New Kilohearts releases after purchase aren’t included automatically. Producers who only need one or two specific snapins pay less buying those directly.

The Same Snapin, Any Host

Effects built for one Kilohearts host run unchanged inside the other two — a chain built in Snap Heap loads inside Multipass or drops into one of Phase Plant’s three effect lanes without reprogramming. Building a signal chain once and reusing it across hosts replaces separately learning three different plugin architectures for three different production stages.

A saved preset stays fully functional for anyone who opens it, even if they don’t own every snapin used to build it. The snapin format decouples what a preset sounds like from which individual products the listener has purchased.

The three hosts aren’t interchangeable in function: Multipass only splits by frequency band, Snap Heap only builds serial or parallel chains, and Phase Plant’s lanes sit downstream of its own generators. A Multipass preset’s band-split routing can’t be loaded inside Snap Heap, since Snap Heap has no frequency-splitting stage of its own.

Cross-Modulating Every Generator at Once

Phase Plant’s oscillator layer draws from four source types — waveforms, wavetables, samples, and noise — combined and layered inside the same instance rather than requiring a separate instrument per source type. Layering a sample-based transient against a wavetable’s sustained body happens on one patch instead of two tracks.

Cross-modulation runs at audio rate between any of the signal generators, on volume, frequency, or phase, including a generator modulating itself. Self-modulating a single oscillator’s phase produces harmonic distortion without routing through a separate distortion snapin.

The Wavetable Editor builds static or animated tables from scratch, but it doesn’t resynthesize an arbitrary audio recording into a wavetable automatically. Sound designers building from field recordings convert those by hand; producers working from factory or existing wavetables skip that step entirely.

Multipass Splits Bands, Snap Heap Doesn’t

Multipass divides an incoming signal into up to five separate frequency bands before any effect touches it, so a chain built on one band processes only that slice of the spectrum while the others run through their own separate chains. Compressing the low band while distorting the high band happens in one instance rather than three separate multiband-capable plugins.

Snap Heap carries no band-splitting stage at all — its seven available chains run in serial or parallel against the full-bandwidth signal, not against a frequency slice. Building the same kind of frequency-dependent processing in Snap Heap means adding a filter snapin manually to carve out a band first.

Neither host modulates a chain’s effects based on a different host instance’s output directly. Modulation inside Multipass or Snap Heap stays sourced from that instance’s own modulators and utilities, not from a second, separate host instance running in parallel on another track.

Phase Rotation Without a Gain Change

Disperser runs an all-pass filter that rotates the phase of frequencies around an adjustable cutoff without changing the signal’s gain, smearing transient energy through time rather than filtering it out. Its Amount control raises the order of that all-pass filter, and Pinch concentrates the resulting delay tightly around the cutoff rather than spreading it broadly.

Convolver processes a signal against any loaded sample used as an impulse response, so a click recorded in a stairwell or a burst of white noise both function as a “space” the same way a purpose-captured reverb IR would. Over 300 factory impulse responses ship with it, alongside Start, End, Stretch, and Reverse controls that reshape the IR itself before the convolution runs.

Both process against a fixed captured or calculated structure rather than a real-time physical model: Disperser’s sweep follows its filter math the same way on every hit, and Convolver’s character is locked to whichever impulse response is loaded. Sound designers chasing one exact, repeatable texture get consistency from this; producers wanting a knob that continuously morphs room size in real time don’t get it from either.

Distortion That Ignores Input Gain

Faturator’s Drive control saturates a signal without the character shifting based on how hot the incoming signal already runs, keeping the distortion’s flavor consistent whether it sits on a quiet bus or a peaking one. Color reshapes which frequencies get emphasized before that saturation stage acts on them, changing which harmonics the distortion generates.

That gain-independence lives inside the same snapin format covered above. A Faturator setting saved inside a shared preset reproduces the same saturation character for a recipient, regardless of their own gain-staging or which other snapins they own alongside it.

Faturator’s Stereo Turbo widens a signal by delaying one channel slightly, not through mid-side processing or a dedicated widening algorithm — it’s a distortion snapin with a width control attached, not a stereo-imaging tool on its own. Producers needing precise mid-side control reach for a dedicated imaging snapin instead.

No Modulation Bridge Between Host Instances

Making one instance’s envelope drive a parameter in a separate instance means routing audio or automation through the host DAW’s own bus or sidechain first — the Kilohearts modulation system itself stops at the edge of a single Phase Plant, Multipass, or Snap Heap window.

FAQs