Agreed, the majority of all CD players comes from the analog
portions.. the digital stuff is very clean-cut typically these days, and
henceforth produces very close to the same output. Its everything from
the D/A converter down through the op amps to the filter/output caps.
I have some expierence in this area - I upgraded a Sony CDP990
from what I thought was OK sound - typically at the time better then
most of the average players. What I found was they used the cheapest op-amps
they could get (early 80s technology), and hence the sound quality of
the entire player suffered, if not distorted somewhat because of it. The
trick was to swap out the original junk op-amps with quality ones - the Burr-Brown OPA series, I also did some bypassing with a few caps, and took out some
crummy eletrolytics in the signal path...end result is a totally clean sounding
player, and all it took was $8 in parts! Its one cheap upgrade, and I'm set
to enjoy my "old" player for years more - especially since nothings really
changed in CD player technology.
(at least since I bought the CDP990).
Course all this is way-off subject from the Ultrasound group, so
I'll throw in some info on the GUS for the heck of it.. it seems to have
OK op-amps, henceforth its sound is fairly good considering what previous
cards have sounded like (very noisy). I'm amazed how well they filtered out
the typicaly computer noise that crept into the output signal as in the
case of Soundblaster & Soundblaster PROs... they have very bad noise problems
I wasn't really impressed with them in that regard, though they did ok for
the time I had it - roughly 2 months before the PAS16 came out, I was real
bum about getting a SBPRO at that time because of that, but now find it
a reasonable upgrade from the SBPRO to get a GUS.
Just wish more games had UltraSound in thier setups - PAS 16 is
sure common..
--> Scott
.s
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Jun 93 20:56:08 EST
From: adrianr@ecr.mu.oz.au (Adriano_Ennio RAIOLA)
Subject: New Windows drivers? Where?
Message-ID: <9306051056.25296@ecr.mu.oz.au>
Firstly, to whichever legend uploaded jarre.zip to epas, a collection of
Jean-Michel Jarre (He being the God of synthesiser music, after all he
virtually created it) MIDI files, umm your a legend! Thanks, they are
fantastic.
Secondly, Phat Tran, you replied in a previous digest that the problems
with volume mapping were addressed in a new version of the windows drivers
and playmidi, but they probably missed being posted out or something, WHERE
can we get these drivers? Are they on epas? Are they part of the new 2.06