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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.
Good golly. It's a soundcard for a notebook! No more putting up with El Crappo sound chips for me! Yes, I am actually being sincere about this :)
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).
Nice move by creative. I make a lot of machines for musicians (being a geek and a musician). Musicians want to get labtops so they can bring it on their tours. People always ask me about how to get a music labtop. With this little box you can have all the connectivity you need (including minidisc which is used to do a lot of cheap recording). With ProTools free CSound and a few others you can have a complete composition kit on the go for an affordable price. Its simply put, exactly what they are looking for.
Expect working drivers in 2004.
Rob
I've been looking for something like this for a while. Not to get my connectors externally, that's not an issue (I can get any extensions I like). To me, the key issue here is that the sound-generating circuits get out of the RF-wise nightmarish environment inside a computer case. There's so much induction going on you simply don't want to generate sound there.
So this is definitely something for my next desktop.
Actually, this looks like something that would be very useful if you have a laptop, and wanted to be able to use it to play music for others, like a traveling DJ.
This might be a good answer to This question.
`Lex - Find Me Here: Text Appeal
Sound systems like this allow one to add high-quality sound support for custom systems that do not have a conventional form factor that allows for a PCI-capable motherboard, for example, apps that are built around PC/104. Nice stuff.
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?
Now I only need a cheap laptop with USB, and I have quality streaming MP3 home stereo. Maybe I get this small Sony with the touchscreen, should be easy to make touchscreen-based song selector... hmm...
J.
Shouldn't this be a job for 1394, along with mass storage, image scanning and the like?
It seems to me that USB is being overstretched, together with ATA and after RS-232C and IEEE 1284... all of the stuff done by ATA, RS-232C and 1284 should be done by SCSI and 1394, and so much of the stuff currently being done with USB.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I wonder if it is strong enough to take a 19" monitor sitting on top? Under the monitor would be a perfect place for it on my desktop.
It may be cool for either gamerz or MIDIcians but I am not sure a solution based on an external 12Mb USB link (IIRC) could bring the software synth user a decent enough latency to use some soft synth in real time with an external MIDI keyboard as a controller.
Pity, Creative web site didn't give this info in their specs.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This is perfect, optical for my minidisc, connector for my headphones, sp/dif for my speakers. This is a great idea and it will be so nice to have all the connectors up front rather than at the back of the pc below the desk. I assume it is built to sit under a monitor (had a power bar like that once). A little on the pricy side though.
My G4 Cube already has something like this, albeit to a lesser extent. it connects to the USB port on my cube and OSX and OS9 just KNOW what to do with it. Wish it had all those cool doodads tho =]
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
2) Where's the FUFMe port!
3) D00d! With all these different ports, there's just GOTTA be a way to rip those copy-protected CDs!
woof.
Karma cap: te only way to go is down. Otherwise there's no point in writing another Score:5 post!
I thought this was rather odd but the requirements page says "Geniune Intel Pentium" and doesn't say anything else. Now I would assume it would work on anything of course.
Instead of taking up a drive bay for the Live! Drive and conecting it via an IDE cable to the Soundblaster in your PCI slot which in turn hooks into your digital decoder for Dolby digital.. plus 3 separate device drivers for each one and separate software apps to drive em and and and...
Now you've got one USB device that is more portable, cheaper and easier to fabricate/package/sell than the 3 individual items, and as an added bonus gets them into the laptop market outside of their existing OEM soundchip customers.
If that's not the definition of a damned smart convergence device I need to smoke better quality crack.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
I have yet to find a consumer device which :-(
:-(
supports software control of IEC958 subcode
information. Vendors seem to think that
implementing "just enough" of the standard to
allow AC-3 output is sufficient.
So stuff like track marking on your minidisc
recorder end up being miserable hacks "flashing"
the TOSLINK output to insert a track mark. This
breaks to various degrees on different minidisc
recorders, resulting in anything from missing the
first few seconds of the next track, missing the
last few seconds of the last track, and the
inability to do seamless run-on tracks where a
song (or dialogue) spans multiple tracks. Using
preroll doesn't always work either, some recorders
will happily record the preroll as silence.
I won't even go into the mangling most devices
do with locking the output at 48khz, thus forcing
44khz source material to be resampled on output.
Maybe the Extigy got it right this time, and
allows software control of subcode information
so REAL track marking can be done, and allows
real 44khz output without resampling.
I'm not betting on it though
1. Start with 4 balanced inputs, each one with its own super-shielded A/D converter. (Possibly increase to 24 inputs for studio models.)
2. Instead of having an analog mixer, write all four of the streams from the four inputs to the hard drive at 16bit/44kbps ("CD quality"). All the mixing can then be done digitally, after the recording session is done. This is what musicians are used to from the bad old analog days when we all had a 4- or 8-track in our garage: we jam first, and then take our time mixing the multiple tracks down to 2, applying whatever effects necessary to get it to sound right.
Current amateur gear for the computer (like this box) requires you to record two tracks (L/R) at a time, and most bands don't work that way. This either forces you to mix the whole band as you record, but then you can't turn up the drums or equalize the bass after the recording is done, because they're all mashed together. If you want that sort of control, you have to record the drums alone (playing to a metronome), then the bass, then one guitar, etc. This process really kills the joy of home recording, and it kills any band chemistry that would come through if you played "live."
The obvious solution is to allow the simultaneous writing of more than two tracks to the hard drive. That way, you can play live but also adjust the individual instruments in the mixdown.
I'm sure tools like this exist, but they're made for studios or pros. But, there is no reason why the thing I describe would have to be expensive. Really, it shouldn't be more expensive than this external Sound Blaster, because the base model doesn't need all the fancy in/out MIDI and optical stuff. I know I would pay about $250 for the contraption, and I'm poor. If I can afford it, many people can. There is no way it would cost that much to make.
The only question is how many tracks USB can carry before it's saturated. Since it appears it can carry two at 24bit/96kbps, it should carry at least four at 16bit/44kbps. That would be enough for me. It may well be that any more than this would require SCSI or Firewire. Maybe also RAID. Fine. None of these things are out of the reach of almost-ordinary joes anymore.
Now if I could get my basement tuned to give good sound and rent some pro microphones (and maybe a mixer), I'd have a home studio as good as any other.
What worries me most is what browser is everyone that has posted comments using if they haven't noticed this??
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
far from it. I dont see any XLR's there or any other balanced audio inputs. This is identical to everything else they make... looks impressive, but it is nothing more than consumer grade stuff with a few frills added on.
Why didn't they make it a bit more useful or offer a better version, something with a 2-4 channel mixer built into it? a real microphone preamp?
and my biggest question is have the solved the noise problems on the digital inputs that has plagued Creative products from the beginning?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While the parent post is obviously a bit over-the-top, it isn't entirely untrue...
I hacked a Netpliance I-Opener, connected a USB hub, D-Link network adapter, a canon USB inkjet printer and an Iomega ZIP CD-R drive to it. This setup isn't exactly trouble-free:
The network adapter dies after a few days up uptime and needs to be unplugged and plugged back in to get it working again.
Uploads from the I-Opener to another system through the adapter become corrupted.
Replaced the adapter and the problems still remained, according to the message boards at http://www.linux-hacker.net, this is a common problem relating to VIA's (the chipset the I-Opener uses) MVP4 USB implentation. Yuck.
The printer every once in awhile just decides to lose connection with the I-Opener. Luckily, it doesn't happen often so it's not a huge concern. I imagine it is also related to the VIA USB controller problem.
The ZIP CD-RW drive works fine.
Of course, I'd be judging USB badly if I just mentioned how a few devices misfunctioned connected to a modified Internet appliance... Except, I've had trouble with USB devices on my ASUSm motherboard BX chipset PIII 850 system as well as on a IMac.
The PIII seems to hate USB mice. Everything else worsk great - USB mice just never show up... Go figure.
Most common problem on the iMac is that devices simply will not show up until you disconnect and reconnect them a few times. Most notably, this applies to my Canon scanner and my Microsoft cheap-ass sidewinder joystick. The scanner usually works after two tries, the joystick - that's a different story; sometimes I give up before I can get the computer to recognize it.
Overall, USB seems to be a general pain in the ass - I'd gladly buy internal cards over ANTHING USB whenever possible.
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
Hi,
I've done (or tried to do) a fair bit of digital sound work using a SoundBlaster Live Platinum card, and, like most musicians using that card, have been very dissapointed by the sound quality. One of the issues is noise generated from interference within the case, and many musicians use external gear for just this reason. The Extigy type card could solve that problem beautifully in theory.
However, I'm wondering that the impact of USB will be on latency. IIRC, the first generation of external cards still used a PCI slot to connect the external gear to the CPU.
For example, their Audigy Platinum card supports ASIO (Audio Stream Input Output) for low-latency access, but I don't see the same thing on the Extigy.
Of course, Extigy doesn't appear to support Firewire (or as Creative calls it, SB1394) on this card either. But it looks like they could make a strong move into the high-end amateur musician market if USB isn't a bottleneck and they add the Audigy-type features to this one. And oddly I didn't notice SoundFont on their feature list...
And before someone else points it out, yes I realize that there is something inherently silly about running Firewire _in_ to an external box connected to the machine via USB.
I have an old laptop. It has Windows 95, but for the hell of it I would like to try to put Linux on it and then make it part of my music system by plugging it into my amp via one of these External Sound 'cards', so that I can play mp3 and perhaps listen to net radio stations.
The laptop isn't fast enough to run KDE (I've tried installing SUSE6.2 on it but it's far too slow). All I want is a minimal distribution that allows me to do what I describe above and looks reasonably pretty. Does such a thing exist? Any help would be appreciated.
I could find nothing in the spec or features list regarding any kind of internal MIDI synth. It does not claim to have a hardware wavetable or soft synth. It seems to have external only. It does not even state it has the junky OLP3 Yamaha cheap synth. If you want to have MIDI, I guess you will have to lug along your keyboard or find a used Roland Sound Canvas 55 module to plug in.
Having real DIN MIDI connections is nice however for the MIDI musicians.
The truth shall set you free!
I still prefeer to use:
MIDIMAN Audio Quattro
and/or
EMagic EMI 2|6
for the real professional on the road with a laptop.
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
My own limited experience with USB sound devices (speakers in this case, altec lansing) has been pretty miserable (LOOK! YOU JUST PLUGGED IN A NEW USB DEVICE! over and over every few hours) but then, it was on a friend's computer, using a variant of the windows virus.
But that aside, I have a technical problem... how EXACTLY is the audio data moving from the PC to this device? I mean what format? How much of your precious 12mbps USB capacity is it using? If not much, then I must assume some compression? Lossy? What about lag? I'd like to see someone play a DVD movie and watch the mouths of the people and see if they sync with the sound. The ONLY POSSIBLE WAY it could sync would be if the DVD player "knew" to delay the vid for 0.08 seconds or something. This is unlikely to be the case with MOST audio/video applications.
All in all, I see this as just another thing ported to USB "just because they can." You can have your lower-sound-quality-and/or-delayed-signal toy. Leave me my good old fashioned built-into-the-hardware synced-with-the-bus sound card, thank you.
What is seen as a good idea here can be extended.
There are various facets in use in the market today, in one form or another....... i.e.
"PC monitors that detach and become portable touch-screen tablets, allowing users to roam the house reading E-mail and accessing other information stored on a PC"
and of course this threads story on extigy
........in what is described below:
(replace "Linux system" where you see "amiga"!!!!)
Enclosures
Image of a modular system
another description of the image (note Raritan is not what it was in 1997 - which was a injection molding case manufacture)
and another perspective
Certainly a musician would find it beneficial to be able to add as many channels (actual hardware modules) into his processing/recording mix system.
Or whatever device you wanted to use to hook everything together. USB is great the way it is now, but if you wanted to start accessing CPU, RAM, and HD with USB... the computer would be so slow it would be practically useless. What you're talking about seems like a conceptually good idea though.
~ now you know
Try the links mentioned at this link
I'm no musician, but can't you just use multiple sound cards? Most dumb software won't be able to figure out what to do, but you don't need complex software to record raw audio.
An out-of-box sound card makes a lot of sense because you avoid the crazy RF environment in your computer case. I think Creative have a good idea with this, and the next logical step would be to include video (since the thing has a remote control anyway). I'm not saying the thing should have a built-in 3D card; that would be stupid. I'd just like a nice, hardware TV tuner (those parts are dirt cheap), and maybe also a TV out.
Of course, the USB bus can't take all that, so the thing would need its own PCI interface, but then it would kick ass.
what makes you think you have to have a cluttered desk to have component modularity?
Try the link I gave. At least check out the image.
I have a couple old sun-3s that I use as xterms from time to time (hosted off a faster machine with usb). Would be nice to give them sound, instead of all sounds coming through the main computers' speakers.
Then I just gotta figgure out how to connect a usb mouse to the remote x-terminal instead of the local machine. I'm sure it is possibla, but I fear i'll have to write some code to do it.
pronoblem
Are we staring into a bleak future of music protected by what are in fact USB serialized dongles masquerading as sound cards? Or am I just paranoid (note: that's a rhetorical question)?
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
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.
If they're targetting gamers, it seems a little odd that they would replace the standard game/midi port with the 5-pin DINs - which you can't plug a joystick into. I suppose they're thinking that usb joystick/gamepad is the way to go, but I really like my game pads as they are. On the other hand, having proper midi connectors makes it seem like they're taking musicians seriously again...
Are we getting ready for a new computing future? This is what is promised by USB's supporters right?
Soon we will get computers in components - one thin case with the MB, processor and memory [etc]. 10 USB ports and then you customize... want sound? BAM! Want network? BAM!
Sounds good at first but then I look at all those wires connecting my stereo it scares me. Maybe we'll start getting rack mountable hardware and a rack to make our own 'case'.
Question though: Can I hook up two computers that have USB ports? That would be the killer app... not sound cards, though this looks spiffy.
But the price is a bit much, even the nice one on Thinkgeek is a little high. Will we see lower end soundcards?
Get your Unix fortune now!
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?
- devices like this have existed for more
than 2 years. products from Midiman,
SEK'D, Event Systems and other companies
offered this kind of configuration for
some time. its becoming more common
all the time.
- creative's audio products are widely
recognized by anyone with any experience
as being basically "just good enough" crap. they have terrible noise problems, and often come with basic h/w engineering problems (such as a fixed rate sample clock that forces resampling at any rate other than the chosen one).
- USB for audio is a bunch of crap. It can be
made to work, but its being used only because
most computers these days come with USB ports,
and far fewer come with IEEE1394 ports. It has no redeeming qualities and many drawbacks. There
are bandwidth problems, reliability problems, connector stability problems, protocol conformance problems - it goes on and on.
- IEEE1394 ("firewire") is vastly superior, but suffers from a lack of standardization on the
transport-level protocol used for audio and MIDI
data. There are at least 3 or 4 competing versions of this, with no resolution in sight.
- Several people have pointed out the lack of
balanced connectors, as well as the lack of XLR
connectors (these two items are strictly orthogonal from one another). Balanced analog I/O is a serious must-have for anything other than
the typical low-quality audio stuff 95% of you
do with your computers. Of course, that 5% might not be a big enough market to make it worth offering
:)
companies like creative are busy trying to make devices that appeal to many consumer's desire for stuff that appears to be "pro" or "semi-pro" gear. creative in particular has failed to make any equipment that even comes close to these descriptions. if audio on your computer matters to you enough that external converters are important, you should not be paying any attention to the extigy, but should instead be paying attention to products from Terratech, Event (even though they refuse to make linux support possible, they are nice devices), Midiman (Delta series) or RME. If you're really serious about audio on your computer, you'd already know that you should be basically buying an audio interface that supports ADAT optical connections and then a totally separate converter box (such as the Tango24 from Frontier Designs, or the ADI series from RME, or if money is tight, perhaps a Fostex unit). this configuration allows you to upgrade your A/D-D/A capabilities and the audio interface independently, which in turn implies the potential for improved channel counts and/or improved converters at a later date. --pI think USB is only supposed to be run in lengths of 10ft.
I cannot see any reason this device would be helpful for you.
First you need a server. Just run one of many mp3 players on the machine and control it externally via a program/webpage. Or run ESD, NAS, or ARTs on the box, and give it any sound data you wish. A maximum of 30ft of Cat5 to the server is fine.
Regardless of where the sound is coming out of, it still needs to get fed to your stereo.. so just run some cables from it to your stereo. So, run some cables.. whatever the length is from your server, run it. I don't know how long certain cables can be, but I'm sure optical ones may reach quite far.
The only reason you would need this is if your server does not have any existing soundcar, but then again.. you could just get a regular soundcard which would probably be both cheaper and better quality.
I don't think this new Creative external sound card is a big deal at all. Oh, sure, it'll probably sell well. There are always those people convinced that their sound device picks up less interference noise/hum when it's outside a PC case.
I just dislike anything USB, for starters. That port doesn't have lots of bandwidth, for one thing. Couple that with everything under the sun wanting to share your USB connection, and it spells major trouble for low-latency sound.
Also, why give a musician a relatively fragile laptop? IMO, a poor hack of a solution. The ideal answer is building a PC in a rack-mount case, and installing it in a rack along-side any effects processors or rack-mount synths/samplers they might own.
You can buy a MIDI "surface controller" to get pads, knobs, and sliders galore which can be defined so you can work anything you'd normally have to drag or click around on with a mouse. (Eliminating all need for a mouse is the most important step to getting a PC on stage as music equipment.)
Interesting. I have never had a problem with any of my USB equipment, minus one due to a faulty USB chipset made by AMD. Note, I haven't touched a windows machine since before the days of USB.. so all my experience is with Linux, some experience with MacOS.
I bought a pci usb card for my sister's computer.. attached mice, scanner (hp3300), and a printer. No problem.
One machine of mine has an AMD Viper chipset, due to a bug in the chipset.. it will cause my system to do a hard reboot occasionally. I use a mouse on this system with no problems, but my handspring visor will historically crash it quite quickly.
Pentium II, Intel chipset. No problems at all, tried the Visor and an Epson printer.
Asus BP6, Intel PII board.. same machine, different boards. Mice, Visor. No problems.
I wonder why USB sucks so much. It works fine for me (minus one due to the fault(s) of AMD)
If you've ever looked at "Software Audio Workshop" (commonly just known as SAW), that's what they do. You throw in multiple sound cards and/or MIDI interfaces, and it supports all of them. Of course, this gets fun juggling DMA and IRQ conflicts at some point - but you don't want to run this sort of app on a heavily loaded system anyway. You'd probably, in fact, design a seperate PC just to work with SAW.
USB audio device. Are the people here looking
for "musical laptop solutions" that bad
at researching peripherals? Is it that much of a
slow news day that a minor product announcement
is headlining news?
Roland's UA-30 (years old, and cheap!) has
*more outputs* than this silly thing (from the
data sheet, the Exigy doesn't even have SPDIF
outs!) and a better interface. It's mainstream
enough that if you plug it into a Mac or a Win2k+
box, it'll just work.
Can anyone provide actual reviews? I mean sheesh, this is such a new toy that it doesn't even show up on it's authorized retailer's listings... It looks okay, but what does it cost, how does it sound, etc?
Additionally, how does it perform while, say, scanning an image on a USB scanner, or while performing heavy mousing on a USB mouse, while playing Quake?
Other than looking like a nifty ad for the device, how about providing solid (and useful) information?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
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!
The SBlive cards have SPDIF I/O also. What they don't mention is that, instead of passing the digital signal untouched, the soundcard performs a D/A conversion, passes the signal through the mixer, and performs another A/D conversion. So even though your minidisc or DAT is passing data over the SPDIF port, a considerable amount of distortion is added to the signal.
Don't know if this new device has the same problem.
I use 802.11b, a card in my server.. and a card for my Visor.
But you could use IR too, for a remote control. There are lots of things you could do, it just depends on how much you wish to spend.. and what you currently have available.
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.
Frequencies greater than 20khz can produce resonant tones in the room that can be heard. But that isn't important.
Digital audio is poorly designed. According to the Nyquist theorem you refer to, 48khz is enough to reproduce 24khz audio signals, IF the phase of each frequency is known. 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. To make up for this problem, higher frequency rates are needed. If you are sampling at 96khz, then for a 24khz sine wave, there is no possible way to only be sampleing it at the 0 amplitude points since you would be sampleing the wave 4 times per cycle. 192hz also shows up, and that is still only sampling a 24khz wave 8 time a cycle.
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.
As to the proper number of bit for PCM, the big problem is that we hear volume logrithmically but currently digital audio records linearly. So while for high and moderate volume, more bits are deemed unhearable, but for very quite things (like quiet passages in classical music), the extra bits come in handy very quickly. The extra bits are also very handy for DSP type tasks, although one could arguably truncate them after processing if they think the log argument is BS.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
it doesn't have the bandwidth to scale to semi-pro let alone pro use. the latency characteristics are just barely acceptable. the entire protocol design wasn't properly thought out for high-bandwidth streaming data services. thats what IEEE1394 is for, both in terms of its bandwith capacity but also the design of the protocol. if you're just streaming stereo 16 bit 44.1kHz streams to and from your box, i'm not suprised you think that USB works. you're at the low end of the audio scale, and there are many things that will work for you that will break for people with more demanding requirements. --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?
BigBlickMopar wrote:
I would imagine that there is a burgeoning market for audiophile sound cards; solid engineering and impeccable quality are more important to me than "3D Simulation" or "32 voices" or any of the other crap that the marketing department invents.
I'd like to disagree. An audiophile-class soundcard just doesn't justify the cost which hardware manufacturers would put on it, and doesn't really find much of a practical application for most end-users. The mainstream can't tell the difference between an mp3 sampled at 128kb/s and one sampled at 196 or 256, and the marginal increase in quality doesn't really justify the space and expense of a better card.
However, as an avid gamer, I can attest that positional 3d sound, especially in first-person style games, adds a great deal to the experience and can improve gameplay, especially in games like counter-strike, where one overly loud footstep can mean sudden death.
I'm not knocking your hardware hacking skills, I'm just saying that high-end audio cards would, like most other audiophile equipment, be a niche market at best, and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers.
- Dave
After the SBLive! fiasco, I'd be careful.
For those of you who don't remember, the SBLive! from Creative had a lot of problems with a lot of different configurations. They tended to saturate the PCI bus and broke the PCI2 standard resulting in compatibility issues with all kinds of other devices, including motherboards with "independant" chipsets like Via.
I hope they have a better approach for their USB design. The last thing I need is a soundcard that upsets the rest of my USB devices.
Sigs are awesome huh?
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
This should prove marvelous for people like me who use a DVD player with optical out as their primary CD-player. I'm definitely looking forward to blowing my speakers out randomly the next time I pick up a CD!
-Jayde
What's a sig?
I'm still waiting for the Layla to drop down to a price I can afford. Meanwhile I've got a Roland UA-100, which periodically has sync problems (though strangely enough it's gotten better since I stuck a USB hub between it and the computer - that still makes no sense to me) but otherwise does the job. Some of the BOSS on-board effects are quite usable.
[TMB]
After looking at the available stuff and reading up on USB latency, I'm convinced that the PCI card+breakout box with D/A-A/D converters is the optimal setup. I wish this architecture would make its way into more "mass production" sound cards so the prices could start falling.
I guess I was silly to think that I had satisfied all of toy cravings in December...
Even at 48kHz, the clocks are never perfectly synchronized so you end up with lost samples and/or new ones added.
Its also possible that (under windows) the spdif inputs go through the bass/treble dsp filter, if the sample rate converters didn't mess your data up, this will ;-)
The Linux developers have been provided with little documentation from Creative, so user feedback is important.
and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers
It's a slippery slope between "32 Voices" (Who actually uses the synth in their sound card anyway? Tell me about the D/A converters, not crap like that) and today's "200 Watt" computer speakers which display efficiency in defiance of the basic physics law of conservation of energy by being powered off a 9V 300mA wall wart.
Yeah, admittedly, Joe Consumer is a fool, too stupid to be entrusted to spend his dollar intelligently. VHS vs. Beta, Commodore 64 vs. TI-99/4A, IBM PC vs. Amiga. Yeah, it *is* a niche market. But a niche market with money, educated consumers who are conscious of quality. If that no longer existed, Maytags and Macintoshes would be gone.
I'll take a little comfort in knowing that there are at least a couple of companies that pride themselves on innovation without sacrificing quality.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.