Digital designs?

[Kimmo Koli]

On Wed, 31 Dec 1997, The Dark force of dance wrote:

> 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.
> 
Well, as the PC is a very noisy enviroment, you can easily mess up the
implementation of soundcard by bad PCB-layout and bad choise of additional
components needed in addition to the actual chip-set. That's why many
soundcards have only 80 dB dynamic range (or even less) with the 18-bit
DACs. And that why soundcard intended for professional audio usually are
external boxes not internal ISA/PCI-cards.

But it's an other issue the who needs more than 80 dB dynamic range at
home. I mean who has neighbours that like you blasting your PC with more
tha 80 dB above the normal noise level at home (that would be something
like 120 to 140 dB from your speakers). And if you need the good old 8-bit
"vintage digital" sound, it is easy to convert the 16-bit wav-files to
8-bit with some free- or shareware program.

Best regards,
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   Kimmo Koli                         Helsinki University of Technology 
   kimmo at ecdl.hut.fi                  Electronic Circuit Design Laboratory
   http://www.ecdl.hut.fi/~kimmo      P.O.Box 3000
   Tel:  +358 9 451 2273              FIN-02015 HUT
   Fax:  +358 9 451 2269              Finland 
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