Without net access, I spent weeks fiddling with various settings until I eventually found working solutions using the PCI delay settings in the BIOS. Perhaps it was you who posted on the net about that PCI delay thing. I got my BSODs exactly once a month so twiddling with settings was a slow process, but by chance I stumbled over a post explaining how with a 'I have no idea why this works' disclaimer. If that post was yours, thanks.
That's the ADC, not the DAC; they're talking about recording, not playback.
My bad then. I did ask someone 'in the know' about the SB16 output and he claimed it had a 12-bit DAC, but it's possible he meant to say 12-bit SN ratio.
I think I meant to write "Bit-Matched Playback". It simply means that the sound card plays back with the same bitness and sampling rate as the original sound. Today's Soundcards resample the sound into 24-bit/48KHz before playback, but even the best resampling algorithm introduces errors. With Bit-Matched Playback the soundcard is unable to play back two sounds with different sampling rate simultaneously but the output is more correct.
You're right. For Linux the audigy is better than the X-Fi, but whenever they get working drivers the X-Fi is the better card. One nice feature of the X-Fi is an option bitmaching similar to Via Envy cards. That bypasses the need for resampling altogether, though the resample engine in the X-Fi is very good.
The original SoundBlaster was basically a copy of the Adlib (a soundcard by a small American company) with digital output tacked on. Problem was the implementation was so broken it was impossible to play back audio without crackles and pops.
The Soundblaster pro was better, but that's not saying a lot. The fact that the follow up - the Sound Blaster 16 - was NOT Sound Blaster Pro compatible is a clear indication how murky the SB Pro's underpinnings actually were.
Speaking about the SoundBlaster 16. Despite what you may believe the SB16 is NOT a 16-Bit soundcard. It can indeed play back 16-Bit samples, but the drivers simply down converts them to 12-bits.
The AWE was better but it was basically what the SB16 should have been and the competition by this time made the AWE look silly - and that is not mentioning the rather dishonest 64 simultaneous channels claim their marketing department threw about.
Creative's first attempt at a PCI soundcard turned out so murky that 1997 era mobos have something called a "SoundBlaster link" to make them happy. Finally giving up Creative bought another company that had made a PCI soundcard and slapped the SoundBlaster brand on it. (SoundBlaster 16 PCI.. or SoundBlaster 512, they had many names for it).
The SoundBlaster Live! was not PCI 2.1 complainant. If you somehow didn't know that you had to turn off PCI delayed transactions in the BIOS you would get blue screens every now and then. It also caused disk corruption on Via chipsets. Fun fun fun.
Since then the Live has been rebranded several times. They even spewed out a SoundBlaster Live 24-Bit that did the old SoundBlaster 16-Bit down sampling trick. How nice of them.
The SoundBlaster X-Fi is much nicer than the Live and the Soundcard I'm currently listening to. But beware, Creative is up to their old tricks even here. They talk a lot about their 24-Bit Crysalizer - for instance - but it is actually a 24-Bit Compressor similar to the 16-Bit compressors used by CD mastering studios. Like any audiophile can tell you a compressor helps cheepo speakers by making the sound a little more vivid and louder, at the cost of less fidelity on high end equipment.
Also note that the SoundBlaster X-Fi PCIe Xtreme Audio is not an X-Fi but a good 'ol SoundBlaster Live! in new clothes!
Dropping DB15 would have pissed off a good portion of their users just so some cheap bastards could drop an adaptor. Oh wait, why didn't Apple do this sooner?
That was an interesting read. It's easy to today overlook details such as fast memory efficient loading and saving of documents that was very much a problem on 286 era hardware.
...and it works fine, but I don't really miss Vista when sitting on a XP box. DWM manager is nice and all, but Vista's supposedly improved search is plain annoying. Searches that find stuff on an XP box often yields nothing on Vista; even IE7's history search function is a step backwards and is now no better than Firefox.
Missing out on Vista is no great loss. As for Linux, it's free so I got no complaints:p
I got a Win98 system with 192 MB Ram and surprisingly that's not enough these days for even casual web browsing. I do wonder how I ever could have thought that system to be fast. Before that I had a P60 with 24MB memory and in my mind it was wicked fast. 24MB meant that I could open 24 windows of ie5 (or so I thought), so when I dialed up it opened just that many. It must have been horrendously slow, but I remember it as fast.
I recently used a Sony PSP on the internet. It out specs my old computer but even that was slow and a good number of web sites fired of an "out of memory" message.
Seems the internet needs more and more memory as time flies by. Soon even 512MB will be way too little for web browsing, mark my words;)
The winner was a couple that had sex on a roof, followed by someone filling his ass with alcohol. The rest must be 'less amusing' so IOW No balloons on a chair, rocket engines on a car, or skydiver forgetting his ever important backpack.
The PC version was in all likelihood ported from the Amiga, not the Mac. The Mac and Amiga versions came out around the same time (1989) with the PC version coming out months later.
"Hmmm. People generally divide into two groups: those who want to lose their work regularly by accident, and those who never want to reset their computers."
Vista now reports the actual amount of RAM installed -- I consider that a regression. Why does it matter that I got 5 gig installed if the OS can use only 3? Oh, and Intel will now be free to limit their chipsets in any way they please as long as the BIOS reports the "installed" memory.
There will be no stupid people, unemployment or poor. Instead we'll have genetically indisposed, between jobs or financially challenged. Say anything else and the PC will hit you.
x86 CPU's have always been microcoded. Even the original x86. The latest Core CPUs are actually closer to 1-1 mapping between microcode and x86 code than ever before:)
The thing about calling P6 a RISC CPU was that it was a marketing win back in '95 when RISC was all the rage.
Never played MM, so I don't know about the context, but the uncensored dialog seem to be more blunt and to the point while the censored stuff leaves more room for the imagination.
Power6 is an in-order design so it better damn well run at 5GHz. OoO at 5 GHz is far more impressive - not that an overclocked Skulltrail truly counts.
Some VMs do give hardware access, but that's for stuff like CD-Roms and USB devices. If Mac OS X already runs in VMs then I guess you should see VMs with Mac OS X support sooner rather than later.
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The Adlib Gold can also take 16-bit samples, but the card was not SoundBlaster compatible. Read about it here.
My bad then. I did ask someone 'in the know' about the SB16 output and he claimed it had a 12-bit DAC, but it's possible he meant to say 12-bit SN ratio.
http://www.crossfire-designs.de/index.php?lang=en&what=articles&name=showarticle.htm&article=soundcards&page=1 might make you happy. There's not many sources for old soundcards on the web I'm afraid.
I guess back in the early nineties most people didn't play music on the PC, but you have to admit that 64KB is pretty darn short.
I do actually have a reference for the 12-Bit thing. Let me dig it up. Ahh, here it is: http://www.crossfire-designs.de/index.php?lang=en&what=articles&name=showarticle.htm&article=soundcards&page=10
It's a good article about early sound cards. Take particular note to "the ADC could dissolve only 12 bits! Many users could prove this doubt-freely in their attempts, however this has never been officially confirmed."
I think I meant to write "Bit-Matched Playback". It simply means that the sound card plays back with the same bitness and sampling rate as the original sound. Today's Soundcards resample the sound into 24-bit/48KHz before playback, but even the best resampling algorithm introduces errors. With Bit-Matched Playback the soundcard is unable to play back two sounds with different sampling rate simultaneously but the output is more correct.
Look at http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/multimedia/creative-x-fi.html for a very good rundown of the SoundBlaster X-Fi.
You're right. For Linux the audigy is better than the X-Fi, but whenever they get working drivers the X-Fi is the better card. One nice feature of the X-Fi is an option bitmaching similar to Via Envy cards. That bypasses the need for resampling altogether, though the resample engine in the X-Fi is very good.
The original SoundBlaster was basically a copy of the Adlib (a soundcard by a small American company) with digital output tacked on. Problem was the implementation was so broken it was impossible to play back audio without crackles and pops.
.. or SoundBlaster 512, they had many names for it).
The Soundblaster pro was better, but that's not saying a lot. The fact that the follow up - the Sound Blaster 16 - was NOT Sound Blaster Pro compatible is a clear indication how murky the SB Pro's underpinnings actually were.
Speaking about the SoundBlaster 16. Despite what you may believe the SB16 is NOT a 16-Bit soundcard. It can indeed play back 16-Bit samples, but the drivers simply down converts them to 12-bits.
The AWE was better but it was basically what the SB16 should have been and the competition by this time made the AWE look silly - and that is not mentioning the rather dishonest 64 simultaneous channels claim their marketing department threw about.
Creative's first attempt at a PCI soundcard turned out so murky that 1997 era mobos have something called a "SoundBlaster link" to make them happy. Finally giving up Creative bought another company that had made a PCI soundcard and slapped the SoundBlaster brand on it. (SoundBlaster 16 PCI
The SoundBlaster Live! was not PCI 2.1 complainant. If you somehow didn't know that you had to turn off PCI delayed transactions in the BIOS you would get blue screens every now and then. It also caused disk corruption on Via chipsets. Fun fun fun.
Since then the Live has been rebranded several times. They even spewed out a SoundBlaster Live 24-Bit that did the old SoundBlaster 16-Bit down sampling trick. How nice of them.
The SoundBlaster X-Fi is much nicer than the Live and the Soundcard I'm currently listening to. But beware, Creative is up to their old tricks even here. They talk a lot about their 24-Bit Crysalizer - for instance - but it is actually a 24-Bit Compressor similar to the 16-Bit compressors used by CD mastering studios. Like any audiophile can tell you a compressor helps cheepo speakers by making the sound a little more vivid and louder, at the cost of less fidelity on high end equipment.
Also note that the SoundBlaster X-Fi PCIe Xtreme Audio is not an X-Fi but a good 'ol SoundBlaster Live! in new clothes!
Dropping DB15 would have pissed off a good portion of their users just so some cheap bastards could drop an adaptor. Oh wait, why didn't Apple do this sooner?
What now?
That was an interesting read. It's easy to today overlook details such as fast memory efficient loading and saving of documents that was very much a problem on 286 era hardware.
Thanks.
...and it works fine, but I don't really miss Vista when sitting on a XP box. DWM manager is nice and all, but Vista's supposedly improved search is plain annoying. Searches that find stuff on an XP box often yields nothing on Vista; even IE7's history search function is a step backwards and is now no better than Firefox.
:p
Missing out on Vista is no great loss. As for Linux, it's free so I got no complaints
There is a Linux solution using VNC. Not perfect but it works.
I got a Win98 system with 192 MB Ram and surprisingly that's not enough these days for even casual web browsing. I do wonder how I ever could have thought that system to be fast. Before that I had a P60 with 24MB memory and in my mind it was wicked fast. 24MB meant that I could open 24 windows of ie5 (or so I thought), so when I dialed up it opened just that many. It must have been horrendously slow, but I remember it as fast.
;)
I recently used a Sony PSP on the internet. It out specs my old computer but even that was slow and a good number of web sites fired of an "out of memory" message.
Seems the internet needs more and more memory as time flies by. Soon even 512MB will be way too little for web browsing, mark my words
The winner was a couple that had sex on a roof, followed by someone filling his ass with alcohol. The rest must be 'less amusing' so IOW No balloons on a chair, rocket engines on a car, or skydiver forgetting his ever important backpack.
The PC version was in all likelihood ported from the Amiga, not the Mac. The Mac and Amiga versions came out around the same time (1989) with the PC version coming out months later.
"Hmmm. People generally divide into two groups: those who want to lose their work regularly by accident, and those who never want to reset their computers."
Windows and BSP users?
Vista now reports the actual amount of RAM installed -- I consider that a regression. Why does it matter that I got 5 gig installed if the OS can use only 3? Oh, and Intel will now be free to limit their chipsets in any way they please as long as the BIOS reports the "installed" memory.
Anyone know?
There will be no stupid people, unemployment or poor. Instead we'll have genetically indisposed, between jobs or financially challenged. Say anything else and the PC will hit you.
I'm not from America and I agree with the grandparent. So your "only american citizens believe that, I wonder why" straw man fails HA! :p
x86 CPU's have always been microcoded. Even the original x86. The latest Core CPUs are actually closer to 1-1 mapping between microcode and x86 code than ever before :)
The thing about calling P6 a RISC CPU was that it was a marketing win back in '95 when RISC was all the rage.
Never played MM, so I don't know about the context, but the uncensored dialog seem to be more blunt and to the point while the censored stuff leaves more room for the imagination.
Power6 is an in-order design so it better damn well run at 5GHz. OoO at 5 GHz is far more impressive - not that an overclocked Skulltrail truly counts.
Some VMs do give hardware access, but that's for stuff like CD-Roms and USB devices. If Mac OS X already runs in VMs then I guess you should see VMs with Mac OS X support sooner rather than later.