Compaq Presario 5600 brings you the newest in audio with a PCI bus accelerated audio system. PCI-based audio accelerator solutions deliver advanced audio processing while maintaining hardware compatibility with DOS games over the PCI bus.

PCI audio accelerators meet the demands of the newest advanced PC audio applications. The PCI audio accelerator consists of a 64 channel, pipelined, wavetable synthesizer and an audio signal processor. Together they can simultaneously handle multiple audio streams of different data types, high quality MIDI synthesis, and voice compression and decompression. Each channel or stream has an independent pan, tremolo, vibrato, and tone filter. The synthesizer handles advanced audio effects such as reverb, chorus, flange, echo, and 3-D spatial enhancement.

PCI accelerated audio provides the high performance of the PCI interface, while maintaining full compatibility with DOS games. Audio requires the PCI bus to smoothly reproduce high-fidelity audio from the Internet, MIDI, wave, conferencing and other sources. The PCI bus audio provides high performance functionality by enabling the transfer of multiple, independent data streams. The PCI bus improves data transfer efficiency by at least 20X over that of the ISA bus. This is crucial for low latency audio applications such as Internet Phone and other interactive audio streams.

PCI audio accelerates Microsoft�s DirectSound� API by digitally mixing as many as 32 PCM streams of any frequency down to a single output stream. This stream can then be piped to any CODEC available to the system. This consolidation reduces the amount of overhead the CPU must handle and frees it up to handle more crucial tasks.