[sdiy] 486/AWE groovebox (was: Re: digital synth design.)

[Johannes Öberg]

to Steve Allen:
About the Sound Font's: aren't the sound fonts the main reason people
DON'T like the AWE-cards? In my experience, most soundfonts don't
utilitze much of the power the AWE cards really have (rather being a
least-common-denominator format), and anyway; you could allow for so
many more sampler-tricks by not sticking to such a limited standard.

To be honest, building a standalone Sound Fonts box doesn't really
excite me, and anyway, couldn't you use a cheap eMU sampler for this?

Anyway, thanks for the .sf offer! I never use sound fonts however, so
I wouldn't have much use for them. Actually I haven't used my AWE card
for many years as I prefer to have a standalone sampler.


phillip m gallo:
> The GUS has that 1M mem. limitation and a fairly noisy output so the AWE32
> is a better choice if you're trolling for inexpensive soundcards/cpu platform.

Personally, I think the AWE is better overall. However, the AWE does
all sorts of interpolation (so you never get back out what you put
in), really only is 13 bit's, and has a fair number of stupid
'features' you can't turn off, and many people think the GUS sounds
cleaner.

Anyway, the latest GUS (the PnP PRO/Interwave I believe) can take 16
megs (with some tweaking) and has programmable internal effects (very
simplistic though). It's also officially documented unlike the AWE
cards, and also has nifty stuff like multiple hardware sample streams
which makes it quite realistic to do simple softsynthesizing even with
a lowly 486.

My choice would really be the SoundBlaster 32 with SIMM sockets (it's
got the cleaner Vibra chipset and is quite a bit shorter than the
regular AWE-32's); when I said AWE32 I meant the AWE-32-like cards,
not necessarily any particular run of the actual AWE32's.

> The integrated emu8000 synth allows a lot of flexibility compared to GUS's
> and you can plug 8M of sample RAM on the AWE.  Finally it has S/PDIF output
> so you don't have to rely on the on board converters for final audio.

Actually you can plug 28 (32) megs on the AWE. The S/PDIF outputs only
the wavetable and FM sounds so you could use an 'internal external'
S/PDIF converter in the box to get separate outs for the wavestream
(SB16-stuff) and the synth-stuff (PCM and FM).

And don't forget the cards got working and easily programmable MIDI
I/O on them already.

> While you're at it you could look for an old '486 single board computer like
> Tecnor or it's like, a simple, small passive ventilated supply could drive
> this combo in a small package.

Thanks, that's a nice tip!

And for anybody intressted in the project, of course you don't have to
use a 486. I figure the sound of '486' might scare alot of people :-)
It's just that the 486 cards are quite available cheaply secondhand,
you don't need anything more powerful than a 386 for this kind of
project, and 486:es are usually satisfied by passive cooling. Also,
all 486-cards I know of has ISA bus, which is required for the
mentioned soundcards.