NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/hardware-part1/9064

Text File | 1996-08-05 | 7.3 KB | 136 lines

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Path: netnews.upenn.edu!dsinc!scala!news
From: [e-mail] (Dave Haynie)
Subject: Re: What the Amiga needs? pssst.... Dave Haynie please read....
Sender: [e-mail] (Usenet administrator)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 22:46:17 GMT
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Dave Haynie)
References: <[e-mail]>
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Organization: Scala Computer Television, US Research Center

In <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Greg Morgan) writes:
>OK, yes I agree we need hardware that can produce 24-bit color
>resolution as standard, but there are also ther things I'd like to
>see, like built in 16-bit stereo sound, something that sounds as good
>as my 8-bit A2000 does, it's sad, but my A2000 sounds better than the
>new DX4-120 pc with 16-bit sound.

Remember the old GIGO principle. If you play garbage on your PC's
16-bit audio system, it's going to sound like garbage. Lots of PCs
support 16-bit digital audio I/O these days, at decent, if not
exciting, quality; maybe 80 dB S/N, about what you get out of an
audiophile quality cassette deck or a really cheap CD player. But
that's only what you get if you're actually playing back something
that was sampled clean at a good 44.1-48kHz, 16-bits/sample.

The first problem is playing canned stuff. A high percentage of canned
sounds for games are run at 8-bits/sample, because they'll work on
many more systems. That's no better than what the Amiga can do, and
could easily be worse. Stuff you record could sound better, but watch
yourself. If you're grabbing digitally from a CD, it'll sound good. If
you're using that "multimedia" or "business audio" mike that came with
the PC, you'll get better than telephone quality, but only a
little. These are cheesy mikes, probably worth about $10 tops. If you
want good sound out of a mike, you start looking at $100 mikes. For
great sound, dump the cheezy PC sound card, and you could spend $1000
for the mike.

Then there's music synthesis. The lowest level standard on the PC is
the original SoundBlaster. This puppy uses a 3 operand FM synthesis
engine to make noise (if you recall the old Yamaha DX-7, that was a
4-operand FM synthesizer, much more sophisticated than the
SoundBlaster). The SoundBlaster became so popular, many programs
banged it directly for sound. That's unfortunate, because even if your
sound card could do better, it can't when Sound Blaster modes are
being used. While the orginal Soundblaster cards had 8-bit digital
audio, most new cards have 16-bit digital audio. But yet, very often
the same cheezy FM synthesizer for music. So this isn't any better
than 8-bit samples (in fact, it may sound worse).

Some of this is slowly changing. Most PC sound cards support something
fairly close to the General MIDI specification. If you're not familiar
with it, MIDI is a longstanding spec for computer music transfer. It
originally defined a 5 pin DIN cable, a 31kbaud serial transfer
protocol, and various commands for sending note, velocity, and other
information about what to play, from a reasonably high level. This is
considerably more efficient that throwing samples around; 44.1kHz,
16-bit stereo sound goes for 10MB per minute, where a MIDI version of
the same thing could be 10KB per minute, or less.

MIDI specifies that any single MIDI interface can support 16 channels
(simultaneous instruments), 128 possible instrument selections per
channel (more with banking conventions), 128 levels of volume,
etc. But it doesn't say anything about whether there will be any
specific number of instruments, what those instruments will be,
etc. So MIDI was pretty much instrument dependent. Until General MIDI
came along. This specifies that there will be 16 channels available,
128 instruments, certain effects units, etc. It specifies that program
1 is a Grand Piano, program 2 is a Bright Piano, etc. up to 128. Most
PCs have some kind of General MIDI synthesizer on board these days,
it's required by some level of the MPC standard, and it's used all
over the place in software that plays music.

And it can sound like crap. Realize, the beauty of MIDI is that it
says that you're going to play a specific note on a specific
instrument. It's up to the synthesizer to produce an acceptable, or
not so, version of that piano or guitar you just played. So when
programs use General MIDI for sound generation, you might get a better
sound out of your system, since it's up to the synthesizer
implementation to produce the requested sample, it's not a function of
the controlling program. And yet, cheap cards probably don't improve
much on the old SoundBlaster sound. Some may use an FM synthesis
engine, but many these days will keep that around for SoundBlaster
stuff and use "Wavetable Synthesis" for General MIDI.

Now, to you and me, "Wavetable Synthesis" is just another name for
sampling. But it's not a whole recorded sample, it's basically what
MOD files do on your Amiga; the synthesizer has its 128 (or more)
General MIDI samples, and will bend them to deliver the notes you're
after. This might sound good, it might not. That's largely dependent
on the sample set you have to work from. Professional synthesizers use
very detailed sample sets -- you can spend 8MB just getting a piano
right, in the extreme. It's more common to store a basic General MIDI
set in 4-8MB of ROM. I have a Yamaha keyboard and a Yamaha DB50XG
synth card in my PClone, each of which use 4MB of ROM for a basic
sample set. Most real synthesizers get a little more mileage out of a
sample set too, since they have dynamic elements, like LVOs,
programmable filters and other waveforming devices to modify the ROM
based sounds. Cheap PC cards sometimes work with as little as 256K of
sample ROM for the whole General MIDI set, with no additional
synthesis possible.

Realize that basic PCs are for the masses. The average person isn't
preoccupied with audio and music, and they don't demand great sound
from a PC. They do demand sound, so you get something fairly cheap in
your typical, off-the-shelf PC. Decent digital audio is cheap these
days, so it can do that, but you may not hear it often. A good
synthesizer costs more, so you aren't likely to find these in
commodity PCs, just yet anyway.

Personally, I would like to see something better in the Power Amiga.

>Another thing that Amiga Technologies should consider is putting some
>kind of 3d-acceleration support, preferrably OpenGL-compatible
>3d-acceleration, ON THE MOTHERBOARD for top-of-the-line systems.

I don't know about OpenGL per se, but it's clear that low-end Power
Amigas will compete with game machines, so they should play hot
games. And today, that's often 3D stuff. I don't know what will
happen, but folks haven't missed the 3D thing (after all, half our old
buddies from C= work at 3DO....).

For the high end, I doubt any graphics stuff happens on the
motherboard. It's been all too common for today's hot graphic thing to
become tomorrow's liability. And no matter what you get, someone's
going to want, and be willing to pay, for more. Keeping this at least
somewhat open makes it easier to adapt to a changing market.

Dave Haynie          | ex-Commodore Engineering |   for DiskSalv 3 &
Sr. Systems Engineer |  Hardwired Media Company | "The Deathbed Vigil"
Scala Inc., US R&D   |    Ki No Kawa Aikido     |     [e-mail]

         "Feeling ... Pretty ... Psyched" -R.E.M.