Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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
- 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. --pAnyone 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 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.
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...