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New External Sound "Card"
(startx) writes: "Well, it looks like creative has done it again. This time they've created an external sound"card" that connects through usb to your computer or laptop. It's called the Extigy, and looking at the specs, it appears as though it's got every possible audio connector you can possibly think of, along with the standard ir port with remote control. With this, a usb HDD, and a usb cd-rw, it looks like I can have most of my box, outside the box, just for the geek factor :-)" I don't think it's quite as cool-looking as the Stereolink 1200 (which I've never actually heard), but for a few bucks more the Creative crams in a lot of features.
Well, the Creative Extigy may be nice, but it isn't exactly the first one to do this. "USB speakers" have a "sound card" built in. And companies like Tascam also make USB-based audio interfaces. The USB audio protocols are standardized, so this should work even for Linux (at least if they keep to the spec).
Featured ports include Optical and MIDI In/Out, SPDIF-In, Line-In and Mic-In.
I'm no expert with current sound cards, but it has that optical line in. Wouldn't that be the best way to 'back up' those pesky CD's with copy protection?
I'm also a musician geek... I wish they'd bring the Digi001 interface into a PCMCIA card, for the same sorts of reasons. Of course, if you have firewire, you've been able to have MOTU's stuff for quite some time now (2408 was the first, but now the 896 gives 24bit/96kHz, 8 mic inputs (with individually switchable phantom), 8 outs (-10/+4 switchable) + stereo mains, and ADAT I/O.
If you're using an external Midi keyboard, you've only got a 32Kbps serial link anyway, so USB is seriously overspec'd for sending/receiving Midi. If the soft synth is on the PC then it will be receiving MIDI (as it would from any other soundcard or MIDI interface) and outputing some sort of digitised audio (24bit/96Khz?) which USB seems well able to carry back to the external soundcard ... and if the "soft synth" is playing soundfonts or similar in the sound card then again it is only sending "note on/note off" type messages, so much less data ... of course SoundBlaster stuff has never been aimed at the professional musician but more at gamers and enthusiastic home users (which they freely admit) so I'm not expecting the quality of, say, Gina or an MOTU unit ...
there are plenty of these products on the market, check these out
plus you don't want to use a consumer card for recording multiple tracks
More Computer Audio hardware
Tascam US428
M Audio(TM) Delta 1010 Logic System
Roland® Studio Pack
Aardvark(TM) Direct Pro Q10 Studio Nerve Center
Aardvark(TM) Direct Pro 24/96 Pro Studio Package
it's really not consumer.. or pro... this stuff... "prosumer" (how i hate that word)
Works perfectly. I think this is a great value.
Looks like it's got Midi in and out, to me... look at the images at the bottom of the page.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I'd like to buy a device like this, add a HD & some powered speakers myself, but it won't work.
One of the major differences between USB & 1394 is that USB uses a master/slave configuration whereas 1394 is peer to peer. The implications of this are that you cannot connect USB slave devices without a master. I can connect my 1394 DV camera to my 1394 hard drive & copy data to & fro, but it is impossible (as yet) to do the same with USB because they would almost certainly be implemented as USB slaves. For the same reason, I cannot hook up 2 Ipaqs and transfer direct over USB.
This and not latency is why I'm waiting for a similar device with 1394 instead of USB.
USB 2.0 is supposed to implement peer to peer à la 1394, but I'll believe it when I can see, and play with it with my own hands.
Pat
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Except that monitors put out mucho RF, even new ones. When you've deliberately put the sound-card outside the box to remove RF noise, why place it somewhere it's guaranteed to get even more RF noise? Unless it's a 19" LCD in which case you're probably OK, and a 19" LCD wouldn't be that heavy either.
Grab.
Analog tape is about 105 db
I have to disagree. Reel-to-reel tape may have a SNR of 105 dB, but plain ole' cassette tape has a much lower SNR, around 60-70 dB IIRC.
CD's have a dynamic range of 96 dB, and a typical SNR of 90+ dB.
105 dB SNR is golden ear good.
With the exception of remote control and 5.1 sound, this kind of functionality has been around in usb audio devices for quite a while now. My Roland UA-30 has optical in/out, 1/4", coax, 1/8", and has been out for more than a year.
I'm tired of these lousy sounding CD's. People only think they sound good because 99% of them have never heard music reproduced at a higher quality
Your beef should not be with the format, but with the mixing and mastering. Many pop CDs that seem to lack punch sound that way because they're mixed for radio play, and FM radio has a poor dynamic range, so naturally you lose the kick in the kick drum.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, if you want a good comparison, here's an idea of the SNR for several home audio components:
Telephone 35db
Phonograph 45db
Cassette Tape 73db
VCR Audio 86db
CD 96db
SB Extigy 100db
DTS Audio Disk 120db
DVD Player 144db
That means - there's better out there, but for a computer? Not too shabby. (of course, as was pointed out before, it is only theoretical - or is it? Creative claims >=100 not 100. Sounds to me like they mean in practice.)
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Anyone considering purchasing one of these cards should be aware of Creative labs "Creative" interpretation of "digital I/O"
.wav file in Soundforge containing a square wave, then used my Turtle Beach Fiji card to write the .wav file to DAT. Then I used the Fiji to re-read the DAT, and recovered the square wave.
Some of their soundblaster cards have a digital I/O port -- labelled SPDIF, and in fact, if you connect a DAT deck to the digital I/O port, it will pass a signal.
However, the card does not pass the digital data. Instead, it converts it to analog, then resamples it to digital!
I didn't believe this at first, but I did the test -- I created a
When I used the SPD/IF inputs on the Creative soundcard, it was obvious that the signal was being passed through an D/A/D iteration. The signal was extremely distorted and noisy. It wasn't a square wave anymore!
I don't know whether or not this particular device has the same problem, but anyone who is looking for a device for performing accurate digital I/O transfer should BEWARE!
I can remember when the AWE 64 SOFTWARE required a patch to work with AMD processors, it wouldn't work on CYRIX either.
It was a software patch that as far as i remember didnt work 100% satisfactorally for someone buying a card of its quality at the time, so buyer beware, this may be the same case here.
"time is never wasted when your wasted all the time!"
The problem is that sound cards do not always record at the exact same frequencies. Normally this is fine, because every channel is being recorded at the same rate -- in synch with every other channel you are recording. If you put two cards into your box and their sampling frequencies deviate enough, by the end of a song, the two streams may have de-synchronized a noticeable amount.
MOTU have NO interfaces for IEEE1394. There is no standard for transmitting audio or MIDI over IEEE1394. Unless you connect MOTU's external units to their PCI/PCMCIA interface card, their devices are useless. Since they don't provide and have demonstrated considerable antipathy to Linux driver support for their interface cards, their equipment is useless for those of us not using Windows or MacOS. One day, there will hopefully be a real standard for audio+MIDI over IEEE1394, and bullshit like the current situation, with 3-5 different "1394-using" interfaces none of which are compatible with each other, will become a historical inconvenience. But don't hold your breadth. Everybody seems to think they (and their format) will be the one to win this competition. --p
48khz is enough to reproduce 24khz audio signals, IF the phase of each frequency is known
I'm aware that sampling discards the sine component of tones at exactly the Nyquist frequency.
Otherwise you could have a 24khz sine wave that is coincidentally sampled only on the 0 amplitude points which would make it be recorded as silence.
Correct, but it can reproduce 23.9 kHz tones perfectly (phase and all), requiring only a convolution with (a windowed version of) the sinc function.
A superior system would be delta sigma modulation (google it for additional information) which uses 1 bit encoding with typically something like a 2.8mhz sampling rate for a frequency responce range approaching 100khz.
In other words, a 1-bit linear sampling rate with a noise-shaped dither pattern.
As to the proper number of bit for PCM, the big problem is that we hear volume logrithmically but currently digital audio records linearly.
I understand this, and recent lossy audio codecs such as MP3 and Ogg take this into account when constructing quantization tables. Heck, even the mu-law encoding used on telephone lines is floating-point (i.e. approximately logarithmic).
but for very quite things (like quiet passages in classical music), the extra bits come in handy very quickly.
Even if we get into a whisper-quiet passage played at 30 to 35 dB SPL, and 16-bit linear PCM begins to use only the region around +/- 127, the ear still can't hear the quantization noise because it's 1. below 0 dB SPL and 2. most likely shifted up into the 16-22 kHz range, where the ear often can't reliably hear even 30 dB SPL, with the noise-shaped dither patterns commonly used in modern CD mastering.
The extra bits are also very handy for DSP type tasks
You're not supposed to do DSP on music you don't own rights to; you're supposed to listen to it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is nowhere near a new thing.
the event ez bus
edirol UA-5
wamibox
digigram vxpocket
RME hammerfall
I don't know how people never bothered to notice any of these. Some of these are even very high quality (the RME and the VXpocket are both for pro audio) and are great laptop sound solutions.
-- atomly