Digital designs?

[The Dark force of dance]

Y-ellow Chad 'n' all.
        What planet did you say you came from. I'm from Tralthamadore 5 myself.

At 11:47 PM 12/29/97 -0500, Soundwave [Chad Gould] wrote:

>This can be done on computer, but sound card
>quality is horrid, not to mention you either have to deal with Win95
>sound card crap (ugh) or custom sound card assembly code (specialized
>and even more ugh). Besides, running the output through an analog filter
>section might be neat.

Whilst I concede that working under the shadow of microsoft is guaranteed to
be a less pleasurable experience than living with your head in a bucket of
lard, unless you're using some old 8 bit sound card, they sound no different
to any given CD player or other digital audio device. Since they use pretty
much the same systems. In modern times, Say since the late 16th century,
Digital audio is digital audio. Period! Whether that be in a CD player, DAT
machine or PC sound card. I doubt there would have been a card made in the
last 5 years that wasn't at least 18 bit with 64 times oversampling. Mainly
because that's the lowest quality bits you've been able to buy in the past 5
years. A manufacturer would have had to go to a lot of trouble to make it
less quality. Same kinda deal with the analogue components.

It's one of the biggest industry con-jobs of the 90s. That one sound card
should have better sound quality than another. Especially since 80% of them
use the same chip-sets.

The bottom line is. If you are a coder and you can't talk to a PC sound card
effectively, then you'll have no hope venturing to build proprietary
hardware. Since the chips you'll need to talk to are the same and talk in
the same manner.

Being a coder, Why not run a Lynux system on a PC platform? Or just write
assembler at bios level. Even a 386 has enough power to do a lot of this
stuff if it's not wearing a microsoft ball and chain. Imagine what you could
do with a P75 and a couple of sound cards. A P75 and motherboard shouldn't
set you back very much these days and sound cards go for less than 30 bucks
a piece. Hell I bought a Crystal semi sound card for AUD$30 bucks for
"TOASTER" just so I could hear RA. That's like US$19.50 at today's exchange
rate. And Crystal are recognized as being the top-o-the-heap as far as
digital audio chip-sets go. Not only that but this sound card is designed
specifically to be hacked. It was originally designed to be a test-bed for
their digital audio products. It's only a hop, step and a jump to add all
manner of digital audio gizmos to it. I have all the documentation and
software and the source code is available on their web site. Not that I'd
know what to do with it of course. It's kinda a shame just to whack it into
toaster and use it as an annunciator.

Being a hardware head and not a coder, I had always thought of building up a
machine like a 386/486 and running an embedded version of Csound or similar
on it. I believe that someone has actually done this now. I just can't
recall the details. No OS overhead, just straight out of ROM. Boots up and
runs like any other digital synth in a box.

Be absolutely Icebox. Oh and Have a new year whilst you're at it. :)
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