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From: murphy@pur-phy (William J. Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Hot Item??
Keywords: hardware i/o ports
Message-ID: <2976@pur-phy>
Date: 8 Jan 90 14:38:06 GMT
References: <1095@swbatl.UUCP>
Reply-To: murphy@newton.physics.purdue.edu.UUCP (William J. Murphy)
Organization: Purdue Univ. Physics Dept., W. Lafayette, IN
Lines: 32

In article <1095@swbatl.UUCP> ammrk@swbatl.UUCP (Mike R. Kraml) writes:
>found that the only decent choice currently available, is the Proto 40K 
>board, available for around $1700.00 dollars or so.  Well, that is a bit
>high for the average Amiga user, I was thinking for on the lines of 
>$250-$300 for my board.  So, what do you all think?? Please send any 

I believe that a good portion of this cost is due to the fact that ACDA,
the manufacturer of the Proto 40K, gets their D/A, A/D, DIO circuitry from
a company called DataTranslation.  DT makes boards for PC bus, MicroChannel,
and Mac NuBus.  They make a fairly high quality board which consists of 
the epoxy encased D/A, A/D DIO module and then the necessary interface
circuitry on the remainder of the board.  ACDA's price is not that
unreasonable considering how few/small the market is for the Amiga.  I am
somewhat unimpressed that their board only goes to 40K.  I would really
like to see a 200K 16 A/D channel, 250K 2 D/A channel with 16 or 32 bit DIO.
I mean thinking about how much bandwidth the Amiga can sustain with a disk
drive compared to the PC makes me wonder why with the specialized hardware
at our disposal the Amiga couldn't put together a blazing interface board.

For $250-300, I think that you certainly could do such a board, but I think
that you may find yourself expending a lot of effort trying to make the
sampling relatively noise free.  The DataTranslation boards have about
a 10/4096 ths of a volt noise when sampling the zero volt signal.  (this is
their 12 bit board on a PC AT. and works out to be one least significant bit)

Well, this is just my 2 cents.  Go For IT!  When I get out of school and into
a real job, I would like to have the choice to use the Amiga for Audio sampling
and synthesising.


-- 
 Bill Murphy        murphy@newton.physics.purdue.edu