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From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac)
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Re: Macintosh sound
Message-ID: <1631@uw-beaver>
Date: Tue, 4-Sep-84 20:51:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beaver>.1631
Posted: Tue Sep  4 20:51:26 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Sep-84 04:02:11 EDT
Sender: daemon@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: Thomas.Newton@cmu-cs-spice.arpa
What do you mean, "quite nice digital sound for the price"?  According to
the owner's manual, the Mac has "four-voice sound with eight-bit digital-
analog conversion."  Big deal.  My Atari has four eight-bit voices, and it
doesn't require 50% of the processor time to maintain them.  Besides, eight-
bit D/A conversion sounds really horrible for music.  The Atari allows you
to combine voices to get two sixteen-bit channels.  The Commodore 64 has even
better sound -- three sixteen-bit voices with various filtering options.

Given the resolution of the Mac A/D converters, and the processor overhead
needed to generate sound, it's pretty obvious that Mac sound is better suited
to voice synthesis than to music.  Commodore 64s and Ataris are pretty cheap
these days, so it can't be too expensive to include a custom sound chip in a
personal computer.  It's too bad that Apple didn't include a sound chip with
the Mac *in addition* to the sound buffer -- I know that I would have been
willing to pay an extra $10 or $20 for high-quality sound & voice synthesis.