Re: Q: Applied Engineering Sound Card

[pubpc1@library.ucla.edu]

spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:
In response to my reply:
>>Um, I take it you mean that the *tiny built in speaker* sounds
>>crummy.  The Ensoniq 5503's output itself is quite nice (about the
>>quality of a good high bias cassette tape, IMO), but you just need
>>to connect a pair of decent high fidelity speakers to the headphone
>>jack or sound card to hear it at full quality.
>
>    Certainly that's what I meant, the little speaker isn't much good
>for anything beyond the simple 'beeps' and 'clicks' produced by
>classic 8-bit Apple II+/e/c software (and in certain cases, even then
>it can be barely suitable at times :). Since the first day I brought my
>Apple IIgs home, one of the first things I did was plug in a pair of
>headphones or amplified speakers into the 1/8" audio jack to listen to
>native audio.  Of course within a few months I purchased a stereo-output
>card so I could get the full effects of the chip (nothing too exciting
>to show off stereo during the days of Music Construction Set and Music
>Studio, but that soon changed once Soundsmith and synthLAB come out,
>or more so with Beatbox and Shellplay! :)

Have you tried Pyware's MusicWriter?  I heard that it was awesome.
You worked with sheet music on the screen, which was printable at
high resolutions (the music symbols were in a font and a TrueType
version was available for users of Pointless).  You could play the
music using the Ensoniq, up to 15 simultaneous notes.  It was what
the Music Construction Set and Music Studio tried to be, but never
was.  Of course it had a price tag to match its capabilities.


>    As for the Ensoniq 5503 DOC, it is a very decent sound chip, but
>Apple seriously crippled it within the Apple IIgs. This included *not*
>providing stereo-out or sound-in for the user (mono only, and no place
>to insert a microphone to record sound, despite the chip supporting
>both stereo and digitizing; you had to buy a 3rd party add-ons). Also
>the fact that they supplied only 64K of DOC-RAM, with no way to
>expand, when the chip can easily address up to 128K. They further
>limited the chip by not isolating it properly from the motherboard
>circuity, so lots of "noise" leaked into the Ensoniq (this was improved
>with the ROM 3 motherboard, but not entirely fixed, which I suspect
>_was_ with the never-released "Mark Twain" prototype, judging by what
>I saw and read).

Agreed.  The fact that the chip was only given half the memory it
could address always bothered me.  How difficult would it have been
to set it up so that you could allocate DOC-RAM from main RAM, like
you would do a RAM disk?  I wonder if a software only solution would
be possible.  NoiseTracker and MOD players use the CPU to swap data
into and out of the DOC-RAM from main RAM, thereby bypassing the
64K barrier...not bad, since the Macs with the older Sony sound chips
had to do this with practically any sound (they had a 256 byte
dedicated memory for the Sony chip).

My question is: how about a MIDIsynth variation that that can handle
DOC-RAM swapping and thus larger waves?


>The final blow to the chip was the low-pass cut-off filter that the
>GS added. Apparently, from what I'm just finding out now, regardless
>of whether the chip or software played a sample at 44.1 kHz (or other
>high frequencies) the filter would essentially drop the quality down
>to around 26 kHz.

Mitchell, could you post the passage from this article?  From what
I've read, the GS does not have such a filter, but the Amiga
does.  The author of the article that I read said that the Amiga's
sound can sometimes be cleaner because it has a low-pass cut-off
filter that filters out the ultrasonic frequencies.  He said that
the GS lacked such a feature.