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From: murphy@gibbs.physics.purdue.edu (William J. Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: AMIGA
Message-ID: <5060@dirac.physics.purdue.edu>
Date: 7 May 91 15:34:20 GMT
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In article <21321@cbmvax.commodore.com> daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes:
>In article <&i4Gzkv*1@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
>>NeXT needed to have sound in the machine.  An IBM beep wasn't good
>>enough.  
>
>Sure it was.  This is a Workstation, they keep telling me.  What do you need
>sound for?  OK, maybe voice mail, but a bus attached voiceband CODEC would add
>a couple of bucks to the cost of the system, you don't need DSP for something
>that low in bandwidth and that seldom used.  Only a personal computer would 
>need good quality sound, for use with games, music education, that kind of
>thing.

Our research group is in an unusual situation in that we actually do use the
16-bit sound quite regularly.  Our research focus is the study of otoacoustic 
emissions (sounds originating in the cochlea (inner ear)).  We use the NeXT's
DSP for doing playback of samples, playback of stimuli, playback of simulations
and playback of fun things such as games are manipulations of the voice alerts
for the printer 8-).  Do we use the DSP for gronking FFTs of our data? 
No.  It's easier to do the coding for the '040 than it is to work in the
8K data space of the 56000.  Besides, the '040 is faster when it comes to 
tallying the time to get the data into the DSP memory and back out.  
We shall soon have a commercially developed box which will allow us to take
samples at 48, 44, 32 kHz per channel (2 channels) and get the data through the
DSP port.  If the DSP were shared with the system as everyone else has suggested
then the sampling would not be assured to be continuous since some other
process could preempt the DSP controlling the sampling.  I think that the
people who chose to make the DSP separate were wise.  If you want to do real
time in Unix then it makes sense to have something that can be dedicated
to doing real time operations independent of the rest of the machine.

Not to flame the Amiga, but where can I get 16 bit sound for it?  I haven't
been following the Amiga for the last 1/2 year, but until that time I hadn't
seen a board that handled 100 kHz A/D and D/A.  I recall that ADCA ( I think)
made a board that did 12 bit A/D and D/A but only up to 40 kHz.  I still think
that if a company would build some serious hardware for A/D, D/A and DIO for the
Amiga, that the Amiga could really make an impact as a laboratory platform.
I remember that the company that makes Cygnus Ed (ASDG) had an IEEE488 
interface.  That is a great start, but I wish they made an A/D board as well.

To be fair, I did see a board by the company that makes AudioMaster? in the 
latest issue of Amiga World.  It has a 56000 (imagine that 8-)) and some
other software to run it.  I didn't read it carefully.  I assume that it can
do 16-bit out with some reasonable speed.
Bill Murphy
murphy@physics.purdue.edu
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